LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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MATERIALISM 

AND 

MODERN PHYSIOLOGY 

OF THE 

NERVOUS SYSTEM 



WILLIAM H. THOMSON, M.D., LL.D. 

PROFESSOR OF MATERIA MEDICA AND OF DISEASES OF THE NERVOUS 
SYSTEM IN THE UNIVEKSITV OF NEW YORK 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK LONDON 

27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND 

(L^c Jin'tthcrboehcr |)ress 
1802 



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Copyright, 1892 

BY 

WILLIAM H. THOMSON 



Electrotyped, Printed, and Bound by 

Ube Tftnfcfcerbocfter press, IRew ]|>orfc 

G. P. Putnam's Sons 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 



PAGE 

Brain of a Lamprey 58 

Brain of a Carp . . .60 

Brain of a Pigeon 62 

Brain of a Frog 64 

Brain of a Man 66 



MATERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOL- 
OGY OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM.* 



Preliminary to any discussion of questions 
about mind, a definition of the terms to be 
used is no less needful than settling the 
points of the compass before seeking the way 
out of a great forest. Otherwise the uncon- 
sciously varying meaning of words may lead 
us to repeat mentally the experience of two 
friends of mine, who, after starting on a 
foggy morning to row across a lake, began 
to think it was high time that they made 
the opposite shore, when suddenly the boat 
ran against the same stake from which they 
had loosed it an hour before. Just so, in our 
present undertaking, ill-defined words may 
cause us to glide along anywhere but to 

* Address before the Philosophical Faculty of Columbia College, 
February 16, 1892 



2 MA TEktALlSM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOGY 

some definite gain for our trouble ; and hence, 
though at the risk of being tedious, I prefer 
to begin with quoting at length from the 
writings of some eminent authorities in 
modern biological science what they say 
about materialism. 

This term or name appears, of late years, 
to be an offense to nearly every recognized 
authority in biology, and no anti-materialist 
could wish for more conclusive refutations of 
its supposed doctrines than those which he 
may read in numerous published essays or 
discourses by such men as Huxley, Tyndall, 
Romanes and others. But soon he discovers 
that a landing is not yet, for when he asks 
these guides of science what they have to 
offer instead of materialism, or as an alterna- 
tive to it, he finds himself transferred from 
one round of speculation to another, with a 
steadily increasing indefiniteness of outline 
and of view, until he experiences an uneasy 
feeling that there has been a curious mistake 
somewhere and that most likely, at the very 
start, in the meaning of the term " material- 
ism " itself. 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 3 

I will began, therefore, with Dr. Georo-e 
Romanes, whose essays on biological subjects 
had given me an impression which made me 
curious to read what he had to say in an arti- 
cle by him, in the Contemporary Review, 
Volume XII., entitled " The Fallacy of Mate- 
rialism." Premising that when once the 
invariable association between material 
changes and mental changes is recognized, 
there arises the question as to the nature of 
this constant association, Dr. Romanes pro- 
ceeds to discuss the question, Can the 
material changes in the brain cause the men- 
tal chancres ? The affirmative to this he 
assumes to be the contention of materialism, 
and he begins by summarily ruling it out of 
court as having no case to argue. For he 
says that where the question becomes one 
not as to the fact of the association, but as to 
its nature, Philosophy, which must have 
regard to the facts of mind, no less than to 
those of matter, must pronounce that the 
hypothesis is untenable, for the hypothesis of 
this association being one of causality, acting 
from neurosis to psychosis — that is, from ner- 



4 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOG V 

vous structure to mental processes — cannot 
be accepted without doing violence not 
merely to our faculty of reason, but to our 
very idea of causation itself. For our idea of 
causation is not derived from without, but 
from within, and what we call the evidence of 
physical causation is really only certain 
wholly mental modifications following one 
another in definite sequence. Hence, we can 
have no evidence of causation proceeding 
from object to subject. The mind, therefore, 
cannot prove its own causation from matter 
or motion, because all evidence of that must 
itself be mental evidence and nothing but 
mental, and hence it is as impossible for the 
mind thus to prove its own causation as it is 
for water to rise above its source. 

Having thus opened the argument, as the 
lawyer's custom is, by showing that the mate- 
rialists really have no case at all, Dr. 
Romanes agrees, however, to allow them a 
chance to say something, by remarking that 
they are fond of asserting that the evidence 
of causation from neurosis to psychosis is as 
good as such evidence can be proved in any 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 5 

other case. But, without considering the 
above-mentioned fundamental difficulty that 
there can be no such real evidence at all, he 
says the statement can be proved to be 
untrue by treating the problem on the lower 
ground of the supposed analogy itself. For 
the only resemblance between this supposed 
case of causation and all other cases of causa- 
tion consists in the invariability of the cor- 
relation between cerebral processes and 
mental processes. In all other points the 
analogy fails. For in all cases of recognized 
causation there is a perceived connection 
between the cause and effect ; the antece- 
dents are physical and the consequents are 
physical. But in the case before us there is 
no perceived or even conceivable connection 
between cause and effect, for the causes are 
supposed to be physical and the effects men- 
tal. And the antithesis pointed out is alone 
sufficient to separate, toto ccelo, the case of 
this supposed causation from that of all cases 
of causation recognized. 

Dr. Romanes then quotes, in illustration 
of this statement; the following passage from 



6 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PH YSIOLOG Y 

Dr. Allman's presidential address before the 
British Association of Science : 

Dr. Allman says : " If we could see any 
analogy between thought and any one of the 
admitted phenomena of matter, we should be 
justified in admitting the conclusions of mate- 
rialism as the simplest, and as affording a 
hypothesis most in accordance with the com- 
prehensiveness of natural laws. But between 
thought and the physical phenomena of matter 
there is not only no analogy, but no con- 
ceivable analogy, and the obvious and contin- 
uous path which we have hitherto followed 
up in our reasonings from the phenomena of 
lifeless matter through those of living matter 
here comes suddenly to an end. The chasm 
between unconscious life and thought is deep 
and impassable, and no transitional phenom- 
ena can be found by which, as a bridge, we 
may space it over." 

In further illustration of the want of cor- 
respondence between the alleged material 
cause and the mental effect, Dr. Romanes 
quotes these words from Prof. Tyndall : 
" The passage from the physics of the brain 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 



to the corresponding facts of consciousness is 
unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought 
and a definite molecular action in the brain 
occur simultaneously, we do not possess the 
intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudi- 
ment of the organ, which would enable us to 
pass by a process of reasoning from the one 
phenomena to the other. Were our minds 
and senses so expanded, strengthened and 
illuminated as to enable us to see and feel 
the very molecules of the brain ; were we 
capable of following all their motions, all 
their groupings, all their electrical dis- 
charges, if there be such, and were we inti- 
mately acquainted with the corresponding 
changes of thought and feeling, we should 
probably be as far as ever from the solution 
of the problem. — How are these physical proc- 
esses connected with the facts of conscious- 
ness ? The chasm between the two classes of 
phenomena would still remain intellectually 
impassable." 

The next objection to materialism which 
Dr. Romanes finds is that, in all cases of rec- 
ognized causation, there is a perceived equiv- 



8 MATERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOGY 

alency between cause and effect, But, as 
between matter and motion on the one side 
and feeling and thought on the other, there 
can be no such equivalency conceivable. 
Some few materialists, he says, have sought 
to meet the difficulty in the only way it can 
be met, by boldly asserting the possibility of 
thought and energy being transmutable. 

On this view thought becomes a mode of 
motion and takes its rank among the forces 
as identical in nature with heat, light, electric- 
ity and the rest. But this view he regards 
as also inherently impossible. Mind presents 
absolutely no point of real analogy with mo- 
tion, because involved with the essential idea 
of motion is the idea of extension, for motion 
only means translation in space of something 
itself extended. But thought, as far as we 
possibly can know it, is known and distin- 
guished by the very peculiarity of not having 
extension, and therefore for motion to become 
thought it must cease to be motion, and there- 
fore cease to be energy. 

Thought, therefore, instead of being the 
equivalent of so much energy, destroys energy, 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 



and would thus constitute a unique exception 
to the otherwise universal law of the conser- 
vation of energy in space. He also asks how 
not only the equivalency between brain mo- 
tion and thought, in general, is to be demon- 
strated, but also what equivalency there can 
be between different minds in particular cases. 
Was the difference due to increased cerebral 
motion which separates the thoughts of Shake- 
speare and of Darwin from those of ordinary 
brains ? 

But Dr. Romanes finds an enormous diffi- 
culty still further in the way of the theory of 
materialism, viz.: that it necessarily embodies 
the theory of automatism, and is therefore 
called upon to explain why consciousness and 
thought have ever appeared on the scene at 
all. As it maintains that the physical changes 
in the brain produce thought, therefore 
thoughts and feelings cannot cause anything 
of their own in the brain, because they are 
but indices which show, in the mirror of the 
mind, certain changes which are proceeding 
in the matter of the brain, and are as ineffi- 
cient in influencing those changes as the 



I O MA TERIALISM A ND MODERN PHYSIOL OGY 

shadow of a cloud is powerless to divert the 
movement of the cloud. But all this Dr. 
Romanes proceeds to show at length as op- 
posed both to common-sense and to logic. 

And, therefore, for these and for other con- 
siderations of a more metaphysical kind, 
which we have no time at present to quote, 
Dr. Romanes finally concludes that, at the 
bar of philosophy, materialism must be pro- 
nounced conspicuously inadequate to account 
for the facts. 

But if matter cannot cause mind, or phys- 
ical change cause mental changes, then how 
are brain and thought associated? In answer 
to this question Dr. Romanes first discusses 
what he calls the theory of spiritualism. By 
this term he means that view which conceives 
of the mind as having an independent exist- 
ence or substance apart from the brain, and 
capable of acting upon it, and so using the 
brain as the mechanism of its thought, for he 
uses the term " spirit" as interchangeable 
with mind. 

This theory of spiritualism he summarily 
rejects, because it seems to him to be merely 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 



the theory of materialism inverted, and, 
therefore, that most of the arguments ad- 
duced in his analysis of materialism are just 
as available mutatis mutandis against spirit- 
ualism. For he claims that, in whatever 
measure it is inconceivable that neurosis 
should cause psychosis, in the same measure 
must it be inconceivable that psychosis 
should cause neurosis, seeing that the correla- 
tives are in each case the same, and that it is 
as impossible to imagine mind affecting 
energy as it is to imagine energy affecting 
mind. 

To imagine mind in any way directing the 
stream of physical causation is to suppose 
(according to him) mind becoming for a time, 
at least, a part of that stream, even though 
the contact should only be, as it were, at a 
point. This idea is pronounced, in a passage 
he cites from Prof. Clifford's " Essay on Body 
and Mind," as neither true nor untrue, but 
nonsense, and so Dr. Romanes says it is 
equally nonsense to speak of mind causing 
brain action or of brain action causing mind. 

As this is a favorite way among this class of 



1 2 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOGY 

writers of disposing of mind, we will meet it 
again very soon. It is of course obvious to 
everybody that, as such a dictum leaves us in 
mid-air as to what anything mental is, we must 
anxiously ask for the what next? If physical 
changes cannot cause mental changes, nor 
mental changes cause physical changes, what 
are mental changes anyway ? 

One answer to this question is a theory 
about mind which Romanes considers a highly 
important one, for, in the language of Clif- 
ford, " it is not merely a speculation, but is a 
result to which all the greater minds that 
have studied this question in the right way 
(namely, in Clifford's way) have gradually 
been approximating for a long time." This 
theory is that mental phenomena and physical 
phenomena, although apparently diverse, are 
really identical ! The fact of there being so 
constant and precise a parallelism between 
neurosis and psychosis affords, according to 
Clifford, " a very strong presumption that we 
have here something which can be ex- 
plained," that is, that as a relation of causality 
is found untenable either way, there remains 



OF THE NER VO US S YS TEAL I 3 

this other solution possible; viz., that there is 
no parallelism to be explained, but rather that 
the phenomena of mind and the phenomena 
of matter are ontologically one, being double 
only, as Lewes expresses it, in relation to our 
modes of apprehension. Just as the tremors 
of a violin string are phenomenally very dif- 
ferent, according as our mode of apprehend- 
ing them is with the eye or with the ear, so 
the tremors of a nerve are, both physical and 
mental, apparently dual, the event may be 
really singular, as an air on the violin is one 
with the vibrations of catgut. 

But, continues Dr. Romanes, if the physi- 
cal and the mental are thus supposed to be 
identical in the brain, the physical and the 
mental must be identical universally, for 
there is no reason to suppose the physics of 
the brain differs from physics in general. 
All physical motions, therefore, are likewise 
mental. We have not, indeed, to suppose 
that all physical motions think or feel — we 
have only to suppose that they present the 
raw material of mind, which has not as yet 
been wrought into feeling or thought, just 



1 4 MA TERIAL1SM A ND MODERN PHYSIO LOG Y 

as the physics of crystalization has not pro- 
ceeded so far in complexity or refinement as 
has the physics of life. In support of this 
view, namely, that we cannot draw anywhere 
a line between physics and psychics, Dr. Ro- 
manes quotes a passage from what he terms 
the most closely reasoned and profound of 
Prof. Clifford's philosophical writings, which 
reads : 

" Mind stuff is the reality which we per- 
ceive as matter. A moving molecule of inor- 
ganic matter does not possess mind or 
consciousness, but it possesses a small piece of 
mind stuff. When the molecules are so com- 
bined together as to form the film on the un- 
der side of a jelly-fish, the elements of mind 
stuff which go along with them are so com- 
bined as to form the faint beginnings of 
sentience. When the molecules are so com- 
bined as to form the brain and nervous 
system of a vertebrate, the corresponding ele- 
ments of mind stuff are so combined as to 
form some kind of consciousness. When 
matter takes the complex form of a living 
human brain, the corresponding mind stuff 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. I 5 

takes the form of a human consciousness 
having intelligence and volition." 

This view has this to recommend it to Dr. 
Romanes, that if there is only one substance, 
and the universe consists entirely of mind 
stuff, we have no longer anything to do with 
questions of causal priority between mind and 
matter, as they are both one and the same 
thing, and the requirements of equivalency 
are therefore satisfied in the world of mind 
and in the world of motion simultaneously. 
As he remarks, also, this view, though not 
identical with, yet approximates to, the doc- 
trine of Hegel, that there can be no existence 
possible ; i. e., of matter or of motion, except 
as standing in relation to mind. 

With all his admiration for Clifford, how- 
ever, Dr. Romanes finds the mind stuff the- 
ory inadequate to explain the fundamental 
antithesis between subject and object, and 
concludes that the only position in which we 
can find intellectual rest is that of which 
Hegelism seems to him "an adumbration" — 
namely, that the relation between mind and 
matter is inexplicable. All that we can 



1 6 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIO LOG Y 

hope for, he says in closing, is that the prog- 
ress of human knowledge may yet enable 
Philosophy to prove the world of things to be 
a sphere — " that all horizons are relative to 
our imperfect faculties, and that the shores 
of mind from which we started are proved by 
our return to be one and continuous with all 
the other lands of being." 

Now, we ask in all seriousness, where has 
Dr. Romanes been taking us ? We started 
with free enough strokes to leave for good, 
as we supposed, the fallacy of materialism, 
but alas ! often before have we been fated, 
simultaneously with those ominous sounds 
" subject and object," to part with our last 
streak of blue sky, and so now the air thick- 
ens apace as we hear of pieces of mind stuff 
in the possession of inorganic molecules, then 
more mind stuff in the film under jelly-fish, 
usque ad finem in human thought and will, 
and then, horresco refer ens, the name of 
Hegel is sounded in our ears, until at last 
Dr. Romanes leaves us in the Great Inex- 
plicable as our final intellectual rest ! 

If we still yearn, one dim hope vibrates as 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 



a last echo, namely : That we may pull along 
until we find ourselves in the great Sphere 
of Things, where mind, to use his lucid ex- 
pression, is continuous with all the other 
lands of beinor ! If this last sentence means 
anything, it implies that Dr. Romanes still 
hankers after Clifford's and Hegel's view 
that subject and object are one. To find one- 
ness in things makes a man feel philosophi- 
cal, but common-sense stubbornly says that 
by the time a man by thinking has come to 
see that interesting object, the moon, to be 
two distinct things ; viz., the object moon 
which is seen, and himself also, the subject 
who sees it — well, he is intellectually drunk ! 

Our next and last authority which we have 
time to quote from is Prof. Huxley, who en- 
ables us by his customary terseness and clear- 
ness of expression to be much more brief in 
examining what he has to say on materialism. 
In an article in the Fortnightly Review, 
Volume XL, p. 793, he says : " I understand 
the main tenet of materialism to be that 
there is nothing in the universe but matter 
and force, and that all the phenomena of 



1 8 MA TERIA LISM A ND MODERN PH YSIOL OGY 

nature are explicable by deduction from the 
properties assignable to these two primitive 
factors. This, I apprehend, is the funda- 
mental article of the faith materialistic, and 
whosoever does not hold it is condemned by 
the more zealous of the persuasion (as I have 
some reason to know) to the inferno ap- 
pointed for fools and hypocrites. 

" But all this I heartily disbelieve. In the 
first place it seems to me pretty plain that 
there is a third thing in the universe, to wit, 
consciousness, which, in the hardness of my 
heart or head, I cannot see to be matter or 
force, or any conceivable modification of 
either, however intimately the manifestation 
of the phenomena of consciousness may be 
connected with the phenomena known as 
matter or force." Prof. Huxley, indeed, finds 
it difficult to conceive much of anything 
about either matter or force apart from their 
sensible properties, for he says : " I must 
make a confession, even if it be humiliating. 
I have never been able to form the slightest 
conception of those 'forces' which the mate- 
rialists talk about as if they had samples of 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 1 9 

them many years in bottle. They tell 
me that matter consists of atoms, which are 
separated by mere space devoid of con- 
tents, and that through this void radiate 
the attractive and repulsive forces whereby 
the atoms affect one another. If anybody 
can clearly conceive the nature of these things, 
which not only exist in nothingness, but pull 
and push there with great vigor, I envy him 
the possession of an intellect of larger grasp 
not only than mine, but than that of Leibnitz 
or of Newton. 

" Let it not be supposed that I am casting 
a doubt upon the propriety of the employ- 
ment of the terms ' atom ' and ' force ' as they 
stand among the working hypotheses of phys- 
ical science. As formulae which can be ap- 
plied with perfect precision and great 
convenience in the interpretation of nature, 
their value is incalculable, but as real entities, 
having an objective existence, an indivisible 
particle, which nevertheless occupies space, is 
surely inconceivable, and with respect to the 
operation of that atom, where it is not, by 
the aid of a force resident in nothingness, I 



20 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIO LOG V 

am as little able to imagine it as I fancy any- 
one else is." 

What we would note here is that Prof. 
Huxley already finds himself among things 
inconceivable while yet dealing with ques- 
tions about the material world. It is the 
element of inconceivableness which leads him 
to doubt. Hence, although he abjures mate- 
rialism because it is plain to him that there is 
a third thing in the universe besides matter 
and force, to wit, consciousness, and which he 
cannot see to be matter or force or any con- 
ceivable modification of either, he rejects on 
the other hand the identification of that third 
thing, consciousness, with spirit, on the 
ground of the inconceivableness of spirit also. 
For he says : " As to spiritualism, it lands 
me in even greater difficulties when I want to 
get change for its notes of hand in the solid 
coin of reality. For the assumed substantial 
entity — spirit — which is supposed to underlie 
the phenomena of consciousness, as matter 
underlies those of physical nature, leaves not 
even a geometrical ghost when these phe- 
nomena are abstracted. And even if we sup- 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 



pose the existence of such an entity apart 
from qualities — that is to say, a bare exist- 
ence for mind — how does anybody know that 
it differs from that other entity apart from 
qualities, which is the supposed substratum of 
matter ? Spiritualism is, after all," he con- 
tinues, " little better than materialism turned 
upside down. And if I try to think of the 
spirit which a man by this hypothesis carries 
about under his hat as something devoid of 
relation to space and as something indivisible 
even in thought, while it is, at the same time, 
supposed to be in that place, and to be pos- 
sessed of half a dozen faculties, I confess I 
get quite lost." So, to use his words, he will 
have nothing to do with the effete mythology 
of spiritualism. 

Turning, however, to what consciousness is, 
he says that he has been charged with mate- 
rialism because he had said that consciousness 
is a function of the brain. In reply he says 
that he is not aware that there is anyone who 
doubts that in the proper physiological sense 
of the word " function," consciousness in cer- 
tain forms, at any rate, is a cerebral function. 



2 2 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PH YSIOL OGY 

In physiology, he maintains, "we call func- 
tion that effect, or series of effects, which re- 
sults from the activity of an organ. Thus it 
is the function of a muscle to give rise to mo- 
tion, and the muscle gives rise to motion 
when the nerve which supplies it is stimulated. 
If one of the nerve-bundles in a man's arm is 
laid bare and a stimulus is applied to certain 
of the nervous filaments the result will be the 
production of motion in that arm. If others 
are stimulated the result will be that state of 
consciousness called pain. Now if I trace 
these last nerve filaments I find them to be 
ultimately connected with part of the substance 
of the brain just as the others turn out to be 
connected with muscular substance. If the 
production of motion in the one case is prop- 
erly said to be the function of the muscular 
substance, why is a production of a state of con- 
sciousness in the other case not to be called 
a function of the cerebral substance ? Once 
upon a time, it is true, it was supposed that a 
certain ' animal spirit ' resided in muscle and 
was the real active agent. But we have done 
with that wholly superfluous fiction so far as 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 23 

the muscular organs are concerned. Why are 
we to retain a corresponding fiction for the 
nervous organs ? " 

Prof. Huxley then follows this expulsion 
of spirit from any relation to consciousness, 
which according to him stands instead in a 
functional relation to brain matter, by re- 
affirming more emphatically than ever an 
opinion formerly expressed by him, that the 
progress of science means the extension of 
the province of what we call matter and force, 
and the concomitant gradual banishment 
from all regions of human thought of what 
we call spirit and spontaneity. This dictum; 
viz., that matter and force are destined to 
crowd out spirit and spontaneity from the 
world, he holds does not make him a mate- 
rialist by any means, for he finds it consistent 
with the most thorouodi-croinor idealism. For 
spontaneity means to him uncaused action, 
and he thinks that he shares a disbelief in 
such spontaneity with Spinoza and Leibnitz 
among philosophers, and with Augustine, 
Thomas Aquinas and Calvin among theolo- 
gians. We might also add, that in addition 



24 MATERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOGY 

to these illustrious names, we do not know 
of anybody else who believes in uncaused 
action. 

We confess that by all this we are becom- 
ing somewhat bewildered by Huxley just as 
we were before by Romanes. We seemed defi- 
nitely to leave materialism behind when Prof. 
Huxley told us that there is certainly a third 
something in the universe besides matter and 
force; viz., consciousness, and which he could 
not conceive of as a modification of either, 
but as a something distinct from them both. 
Now, with but a few paragraphs intervening, 
he tells us that science is wholly to substitute 
matter and force for everything called spirit 
and spontaneity. We, therefore, turn back to 
find what he pronounces that third something, 
viz., consciousness, to be, and all that we can 
get out of his words is that consciousness in 
certain forms at any rate, is a function of the 
brain. Then, finally, when the really crucial 
question arises whether this consciousness 
can exist separate from the material brain, 
and, therefore, may not die with the brain 
when it dies, his language is as follows : 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 2$ 

" As physical science states this problem it 
seems to stand thus : Is there any means of 
knowing whether the series of states of con- 
sciousness, which has been casually associated 
for threescore years and ten with the arrange- 
ment and movements of innumerable millions 
of successively different material molecules, 
can be continued, in like association, with 
some substance which has not the properties 
of matter and force ? As Kant said on a 
like occasion, if anybody can answer that 
question, he is just the man I want to see. If 
he says that consciousness cannot exist ex- 
cept in relation of cause and effect with cer- 
tain organic molecules, I must ask how he 
knows that, and if he says it can, I must put 
the same question. And I am afraid that, 
like jesting Pilate, I shall not think it worth 
while, (having but little time before me,) to 
wait for an answer." 

Thus, as Dr. Romanes left us in the midst 
of the great Inexplicable, so Prof; Huxley now 
gayly leaves us in the mid-point of the great 
Unknowable. If you look this way, he jest- 
ingly exclaims, How do you know that ? 



26 MATERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOGY 

And if you look that way, again, How do you 
know that ? Good-bye, for time is up ! 

We admit our experiencing some soreness 
of spirit at this situation for this reason ; 
namely, that we have long been conscious of 
sundry frequent deflections of our course pro- 
duced by a jerky and irregular use by these 
scientific guides of certain terms or words. 
Occasionally these words tend this way and 
then that, with a consequent unwarrantable 
change in direction. It is vexatious to have 
to show all this, for it obliges us to lose a 
great deal of time in retracing our course, but 
we cannot help it, as otherwise we might as 
well give up our attempt to reach some land- 
ing-place altogether. 

Thus, all through this reasoning, we have a 
great use of the term " Inconceivable," by 
way of an answer or refutation. When this 
word is pronounced, it is as the death-sentence 
of every opposing hypothesis or argument. 
Two other words are also often employed 
by this class of reasoners, sometimes as sy- 
nonymous or interchangeable with inconceiv- 
able, or at least of equal rank with it in 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 2J 

executive authority to enforce a quietus ; 
namely, the words " unthinkable" and " un- 
knowable." But let us examine, for a moment, 
the title to such high jurisdiction of each one of 
these words. This word " inconceivable " has 
at least two very different meanings (and there- 
fore very different authority in our present dis- 
cussion) according to its relation to two quite 
distinct mental processes with which it is often 
connected. Thus, a fact may be both con- 
ceivable and equally inconceivable. Take for 
illustration, the idea of infinite space. Ac- 
cording to our logical faculty, we cannot con- 
ceive of space being otherwise than infinite. 
By that mental process we cannot conceive of 
any distance so great that we must necessarily 
stop there, because there can be no beyond to 
that. But try to picture infinity to yourself 
and you find it utterly unimaginable. The 
imagination indeed is a faculty which makes 
pictures, but the materials of its pictures are 
always earthly and it quickly fails, when asked 
even by logic, to follow it away from this 
earth. The astronomer tries in vain to help 
it by making it take passage on a rapid ex- 



28 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOG Y 

press train to the nearest fixed star, for his 
time-table of some twenty-five millions of 
years extinguishes the poor imagination as 
effectually as his previous statement of the 
mileage did. And yet we find these writers 
constantly using this word inconceivable, 
when they really mean unimaginable. We 
have just found Prof. Huxley doing so when 
he says that he has never been able to form 
the slightest conception of those "forces" or 
of those " atoms," which are separated by 
mere space devoid of contents, through which 
they radiate their attractive and repulsive 
" forces." What he really means is that he 
cannot imagine atoms. But the majestic 
science of chemistry has conceived a good 
deal about atoms, by logical inference, 
and will hold on to its inferences whether 
Huxley or anybody else can conceive them or 
not. How easy is it also to conceive, in 
any sense, that wonderful Ether which the 
physical philosophers now talk so much 
about ? 

The term "unthinkable" may also be used 
in its own proper sense, or it may mean simply 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 29 

" unintelligible." A statement may be truly 
pronounced unthinkable if it involves a flat 
contradiction to what is thinkable, as, for ex- 
ample, that a given line may be, and also not 
be, perpendicular to the same plane. But 
another statement may be beyond the reach 
of any faculty of the mind, whether logical or 
otherwise, simply because, for any thinking 
about it, the materials out of which ideas are 
evolved are wholly wanting. Thus, we have 
some of our own species who have never had 
more than four senses. A very intelligent 
man, for example, upon whose memory 
not a trace of the sensation of light on 
the retina was possible, once told me that 
he had seen a great cannon and the pro- 
jectile which was used in it. He described 
both these objects very well ; in fact, better, 
naturally, than I would, for he particularly 
noticed the proportionate weight and shape 
of the projectile and the smoothness of the 
bore of the cannon with a better educated 
sense of touch than mine. Now, if such an 
intelligent man as he was should have a part 
of Dr. Huggins's presidential address before 



30 MATERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOGY 

the last meeting of the British Association of 
Science read to him, which told him that Dr. 
Huggins could prove by his spectroscope 
that the star p Aurigse is a double star, and 
that although it is not probable that a tele- 
scope will ever be made which will show this 
seemingly single star to be actually two, yet 
that his spectroscope tells him it is two, and 
that each of the pair is a much larger sun 
than our sun, and that they are distant from 
each other only 8,000,000 miles, or less than 
one-twelfth of the distance of the earth from 
our sun, and moreover, that his spectroscope 
also tells him just how heavy they are and how 
rapidly they revolve round each other, down 
to the distance, per second, of one tenth of 
an English mile ; that is, the distance be- 
tween Forty-seventh and Fiftieth streets ; 
and lastly, that they contain hydrogen, iron, 
sodium and other metals. What would this 
blindman first try to do ? He would ask for 
this wondrous spectroscope and feel its prism 
all over, and then he tries whether it has 
sound, taste or smell, how heavy and how 
hard it is, and then he leaves it, saying : " I 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 3 I 

cannot conceive how this angular thing can pos- 
sibly tell you anything about two worlds which 
you call fixed stars, and which you say are 
vastly more distant than the nearest of those 
stars, and which nearest would take the Chi- 
cago Limited over twenty-five million of years 
to reach. You say that the best of telescopes 
show any one of these stars only as small 
bright points like pin points. The only 
points I know of are those which prick ; are 
they like them ? Your spectroscope reminds 
me most of the glass pendants in my parlor 
chandelier, and a telescope seems to me most 
like a great cannon, which, however, is never 
loaded, and as to the spectrum image on its 
screen, which you speak of, let me feel it, to 
find whether I can tell what those lines in the 
red band and in the green are like which cnve 
you so much information." Indeed, what 
would be the blindman's mental attitude to 
any such statements ? In the first place he 
would hunt in vain for any adequate mate- 
rials in his mental store which would afford 
him the slightest data for a correct under- 
standing of the spectroscopic analysis. To 



32 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOG Y 

him such statements would be simply unintel- 
ligible from beginning to end. But would 
he therefore pronounce them to be nonsense, 
(as Romanes says that to say mind acts on 
matter is nonsense,) that is, really unthinkable ? 
All which such a rational mind would say is 
that the " how " of the spectroscopic analysis 
is beyond his powers of imagination and his 
powers of logical inference. Likewise all that 
a rational mind need say about the " how " of 
the action of mind upon matter, or con- 
versely of matter upon mind, is that said 
" how" is now simply unintelligible to us, but 
that where nonsense is actually present is in 
the mouth of him who denies that such recip- 
rocal interaction exists. 

It is, however, with the term " unknowa- 
ble " that these thinkers clear the court-room 
of all protestants the most frequently and 
summarily. If they used this term in its 
legitimate sense they might rest assured that 
there would be small occasion for them to 
have resort to its process of ejectment, for 
the simple reason that neither they nor any- 
one else would often bring their questions 



OF THE NER VO US S YS TEA/. 3 3 

for adjudication to the bar, either of science 
or of philosophy. The only thing we ever 
really know is some fact of undoubted per- 
sonal experience. About all other facts we 
do not know, but, instead, we infer, which 
essentially is a very different thing from real 
knowing, however great our sense of the cer- 
tainty of our inferences be. Therefore, only 
he deserves to have the straight-jacket of the 
"knowable" put upon him who talks without 
having any facts of experience to begin with. 
If he had any such facts whatever he could 
legitimately claim the right to go as far as 
they went, and stop there, with inferences for 
the rest of the way, just because that is the 
scientific way of doing things. The ratio 
between his facts and his conclusions might 
be — facts 10, plus inferences 90, equal con- 
clusion 100. But his process is purely legiti- 
mate, nevertheless, as the whole world of 
science will testify. For there is scarcely a 
branch of science in which this process is not 
about the only process possible. Because in 
each the facts of real knowledge only lead 
part way to the conclusion, with the remain- 



34 MATERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOGY 

ing proportion of inferences of very varying 
amount in each. In chemistry, for example, 
the whole science rests on inferences, and 
probably always will. What, also, is geology 
based upon but inference ? 

But in the whole sisterhood of the sciences 
it is biology which depends most on inference 
for her very life. Strip biology of every- 
thing except the concrete knowable, and do 
away with all conclusions by inference, and it 
would be hard to imagine what a congress of 
biologists would find to talk about. If they 
began with mentioning living protoplasm — 
what is life ? — how much do they know ? 
that's the word now know, that said proto- 
plasm is living or not living, or how much 
living, or when it began to live, and what it 
does when it stops living ? 

As the leading author in the English lan- 
guage on physiology, Prof. Michael Foster 
says, (p. 36, fifth edit): " Our knowledge of 
the nature of Protoplasm cannot at present, 
and possibly never can, be recognized by the 
microscope, and therefore must be based on 
inferences;" and again, (p. 34): "The differ- 



OF THE NER VO US S YS TEM. 3 5 

ences between a dead human body and a liv- 
ing one are still, to a large extent, estimated 
by drawing inferences rather than actually 
observed." Alas for Romanes, Huxley and 
all their brethren, if the straight-jacket of the 
"knowable" is to be put upon him among 
them who begins inferring instead of know- 
ing ! If they of all men were not allowed to 
infer, but only to know, they would be of all 
men the most miserable, for what would then 
become of Natural Selection, Evolution and 
the rest of their great array of inferences, 
which, even as theories, are scarcely yet out 
of the embryonic stage of development, but 
are still showing rapid changes of form in 
their soft parts, first of hypertrophy and then 
of atrophy. There is, in fact, much of mere 
dialectic artifice for begging the whole ques- 
tion at issue in their frequent recourse to the 
sounding word ''unknowable" on the part of 
writers of this school, who show the greatest 
readiness to emancipate themselves from the 
really knowable whenever it suits their con- 
venience. The only fair procedure in any 
discussion on the facts of Mind, of Life or of 



36 MA TERIAL1SM AND MODERN PHYS10L0G Y 

Death, is to recognize the right of every one, 
whatever his tenets be, to infer, and to judge 
him accordingly. To ask anyone, when con- 
sidering such questions, how he knows this or 
how he knows that, is much like asking a ship 
captain how clearly he sees the coast he is 
sailing to and refusing to trust him till he 
does see it. 

We have dwelt thus long on the meaning 
of certain terms, because, without such a pre- 
liminary examination of their applicability we 
would have to be silenced in a discussion of 
the most important question in the world, by 
some of the loosest reasoning which has ever 
been occasioned by it. To lose no more 
time, therefore, we will finally .consider but 
one term further, and that is the meaning of 
the term " function," for, as we have seen 
Prof. Huxley use this word, the whole ques- 
tion turns upon it. Consciousness, in certain 
forms, at any rate, he states to be a function 
of brain matter. We take it, therefore, that 
he will not object to the identification of con- 
sciousness, in certain aspects of it at any 
rate, with mind. Prof. Huxley, as we have 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 37 

seen, defines " function " as " that effect, or 
series of effects, which results from the activ- 
ity of an organ." To which definition I will 
only add that we mean by " function " the 
specific work of an organ or tissue for which 
work it has been specifically constructed ; 
hence there is no function, vital or non-vital, 
without corresponding structure. A lamp 
is a construction for a function ; viz., that of 
giving light. So is a steam-engine a struc- 
ture for a function. Derange the structure 
and you will correspondingly derange the 
function. Let the wick be cut in the lamp or 
otherwise damage its mechanism and its light- 
giving function will be correspondingly dis- 
ordered. Every function of the living body 
exactly corresponds to these facts in mechan- 
ism. Each pysiological function depends 
upon its corresponding specific bodily 
mechanism, and we do not see how the ner- 
vous mechanism can be an exception to this 
rule any more than the muscular or the 
glandular mechanisms of the body are. 

But here comes the important point, and it 
is this : Mechanism* though an essential, yet 



38 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOG Y 

is not the only essential part of function in 
any example whatever, living or not living. 
You may have the mechanism of a lamp per- 
fect throughout, but the function of light- 
giving imperfect, deranged or utterly impossi- 
ble, because the oil is bad, or mixed with 
water, or because there is no oil in the wick, 
but only water. In every mechanism, there- 
fore, the mechanism is nothing by itself. 
Therefore, is the nervous mechanism any- 
thing by itself? If not, what is needed plus 
mechanism in the nervous system for nervous 
function ? If we look to the nearest appar- 
ent quarter for that important plus quantity, 
and were guided by the facts connected with 
the other bodily functions, we would have to 
answer, Supply good blood to the nervous 
mechanism, and then it will functionate ac- 
cordingly. The blood thereof is the life 
thereof, quite as much in the nervous system 
as in the muscular system. If you doubt it, 
mix a little of that functional poison, opium, 
with the blood and you will see. You will 
have then the completest kind of functional 
nervous manifestations ; that is, opium think- 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 39 

ing, without the best microscope being able 
to show afterward the slightest structural 
change, in any part whatever, of the nervous 
mechanism. 

Therefore we can proceed now at a rapid 
pace. Healthy blood is transformed food 
stuff, and brain function ; that is, feelings, 
thoughts, purposes and what not, bear the 
same genetic relation to our meat and pota- 
toes as Stephenson's famous express train to 
its ultimate source of energy, when he re- 
marked, as it thundered past: " There goes 
the light of the sun !" Mind stuff, therefore, 
resides in our meat and potatoes, as truly as 
the light of the sun resides in the opaque coal 
of the steam-engine, and behold in it is the 
plus quanity requisite for the nervous meclv 
anism to functionate ; that is, to manifest 
thought. Is that what Prof. Huxley means 
when he says that consciousness is a function 
of nervous matter ? 

This is no small question. No one would 
care long to debate about it if it were only 
a question of natural history. It is rather 
a question which overshadows all others 



40 MATERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOGY 

in practical importance, for it comes to 
each man as no other question does when 
reduced to its naked statement ; thus, am I a 
Function or a Person? If I am a function, 
then I am only a result of a nervous mech- 
anism energized by blood. Derange my 
nervous mechanism and I will be a corre- 
spondingly deranged personality. Derange 
the functional element in my blood and I 
will be a correspondingly modified person- 
ality. Derange either of these necessary con- 
stituents of my personality to what is termed 
the fatal degree, and then I end altogether ! 
For, is not the idea of a spirit or mind in- 
dependent of both nervous tissue and blood, 
a fiction, a ghost, which a man carries under 
his hat, inconceivable because it hath no geo- 
metrical figure? 

We have the issue now joined. Therefore 
we say here plainly that whoever claims that 
mind is a function of nervous tissue in any 
proper physiological sense, is a pure material- 
ist, whether he likes the name or not, for 
logically the statement is that, as muscle 
structure and blood are the pnly factors 



OF THE NER VO US S YSTEM. 4 1 

known to the physiologist, for the genesis of 
muscular function, when its proper stimulus 
is applied, so may the same be said of ner- 
vous structure and blood, as the only factors 
in the genesis of mind. The answer to this 
materialistic doctrine is that a very different 
statement of the case can be made thus : 
Instead of consciousness or thought being a 
function of nervous tissue, the perception of a 
sensation through nervous tissue is a function 
of consciousness — that is to say, consciousness 
is independent of nervous tissue, and uses 
nervous tissue to perceive with. Therefore, 
though we may say that at present, the con- 
ditions of mental manifestations require the 
conditions requisite for nervous function, this 
is only saying that the conditions of nervous 
function are the occasion, but not the cause, 
of mental working, just as a microscope is the 
needful condition for seeing objects which 
without it would be totally invisible. But to 
speak of consciousness or thought as a func- 
tion of nervous matter is to bring thought into 
the same category with bodily and material 
functions in general, and therefore to pro- 



4 2 MA TEA' I A L ISM A ND MODERN PHYSIOL OGY 

nounce it a product of some form of energy 
acting through its proper mechanism, when 
facts may show that this can no more be main- 
tained about thought than one can maintain 
that the microscope itself sees, instead of be- 
ing seen through, though without the micro- 
scope nothing that is seen through it would 
be seen at all, or if the microscope's lenses 
are out of order, so will everything seen 
through it be seen badly. That the micro- 
scope does not see, however necessary it be 
for seeing, is manifest, because nothing in the 
universe out of which microscopes can be 
made can have the faintest connection with a 
power of consciousness. How perfectly sui 
generis any operation of consciousness is, and 
how specifically different from any property 
or consequence of anything material or un- 
conscious, we have seen stated in the strong- 
est terms by Romanes, Allman and Tyndall, 
and yet if consciousness is a function of cerebral 
matter it is no different from the light given off 
from the oil in a lamp, and is the purely mate- 
rial result of purely material conditions. Are 
there any reasons, therefore, for supposing 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 43 

that, besides blood-derived energy, there is 
anything else acting in or on nervous matter 
which is itself neither the one nor the other, 
nor both together of these two ? Something 
which really corresponds to Huxley's third 
thine in the universe, which is neither matter 
nor force, nor any conceivable modification of 
either, and which if Huxley had only held on 
to, we would have had no dispute with 
him? If there be this something else, what 
is it? 

This question brings us to those confines 
of mental territory where only illustrative 
analogies can be used. One disputant will 
say that given a nervous mechanism and its 
needful source of function, and you have a 
suggestion of a musical instrument, a violin, 
for example. A violin's strings are so placed 
over a properly constructed cavity for air to 
resound in, and the due tension of each string 
is so provided for by its proper mechanism 
that all you need now is a musician, who will 
take it up and play. Its function is to give 
out music. Damage any part of the mechan- 
ism, as by loosening its strings, and no musi- 



44 MATERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOGY 

cian can make it give out music, but, at best, 
only noise. Analyze the product, namely, 
sound, and that is no part of the mechanism, 
but of the air in and around the box. But, 
to produce music, you must have something 
quite distinct from either the violin or the air, 
namely, the musician. Without him the vio- 
lin would give forth no music, however con- 
structed it be for music, or however well you 
supplied it with air. 

But, for exact thought, we must always be 
on our guard about illustrations. Illustra- 
tions are the favorite handmaids of error, be- 
cause they can so naturally work all the 
mischiefs of half truths, in the fact that they 
emphasize only the applicable parts of any 
analogy, and thus serve to hide all the defec- 
tive parts. For another disputant may say 
that not the violin, which needs a musician to 
make it give out music, is the proper illustra- 
tion in point, but a mechanism which does 
give out music without any musician what- 
ever, namely, an Eolian harp. According as 
you arrange the strings, at different distances 
or angles from each other, and at different 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 45 

lengths, and then place them so that a cur- 
rent of air will flow through them, you will 
have music accordingly, varied with the 
strength, or velocity of the current. The air 
is part of a vast ocean called the atmosphere, 
and while each harp has its peculiarities ac- 
cording to its size, number of wires, position, 
etc., its function source has no peculiarity, 
but is one and the same in all. So a man 
may be a specially constructed mechanism, 
whose individual peculiarities are all due to 
the arrangement of his fibres. Some lives 
give forth long, rich, harmonious notes 
throughout ; others, from unhappy arrange- 
ments of their fibres, give forth little else but 
prolonged discords, and others a strange 
mixture of both ; but all these individual or 
so-called personal characteristics are matters 
of fibre arrangement, as this is played upon by 
the great ocean. of psychic force (if you so 
please to call it) in the universe. Put in this 
way, we turn for our answer to what' we can 
infer from an inspection of the physical 
mechanism itself of thought, namely, the 
Nervous System. Does an inspection of its 



46 MATERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOGY 



structure and mode of workine £ive 

o o 



US 



grounds for inferring that, like the violin, it 
needs something quite independent of itself 
to cause it to ^ive forth its wondrous mani- 
festations, or is it like the Eolian harp, which 
contains within itself, and the accident of its 
location, every condition necessary for its 
specific operations ? 

What, therefore, is a nervous system ? 
The term itself implies that it is a composite 
structure and so, in all the higher animals, we 
must describe their nervous systems as con- 
geries of an immense number of nervous 
systems, each of which can be regarded as 
originally separate and independent, and yet 
each equally illustrating the same funda- 
mental modes or laws of nervous operations. 
It is hence necessary to go down to the low- 
est forms of life, which show the presence of 
a nervous system in its simplest state, to 
determine what primary nervous action is, 
because' in animals higher in the scale than 
they, with a number of such systems associ- 
ated, their mutual interaction causes the opera- 
tion to be proportionately more complex. 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 47 

Now, such a primary nervous system is found 
to be composed of three parts. 

The first is a fine streak of nervous matter, 
proceeding inward from the surface until it 
ends in the second element, which is a cell, or 
small collection of nervous cells hidden within, 
and called the nerve centre, because from it 
proceeds the third and final part of the system, 
namely, a second nerve filament, quite like the 
first in appearance, but very different from it 
in function. For the function of the first fila- 
ment is to transmit an impression made upon 
it at the surface to the nerve centre. The 
second filament, on the other hand, originates 
in the nerve centre, and therefore transmits 
not an impression but an impulse from the 
nerve centre outward. It ends most fre- 
quently in a small plate which is applied to a 
muscular fibre, and its impulse is manifested 
by its causing the muscular fibre to move, or 
to contract. The first nerve is, therefore, fre- 
quently called a sensory nerve, because it 
transmits something like a sensation to the 
nerve centre, and the second a motor nerve, 
because it causes muscular movement. The 



48 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PH YSIOL OGY 

better terms, however, because more general, 
are afferent instead of sensory for the first 
nerve, because it indicates transmission to, 
and efferent for the second nerve, because it 
transmits from, or out of, the centre. Be- 
cause many afferent nerves do not transmit 
sensations, properly speaking, and many effer- 
ent nerves do not cause motion. Hence we 
have our primary nervous system consist of 
one nerve afferent and one nerve efferent and 
one centre. 

Now, as we have some insight into the 
functions of the two nerves, what is the func- 
tion of the nerve centre ? As Dr. Foster says, 
the advent of an impression by the afferent 
nerve is a busy time for the centre, during which 
many processes, of which at present we have 
very little exact knowledge, are being carried 
on in it, but which end in something very like 
an explosion, which makes its exit by the effer- 
ent nerve. The nerve centre therefore does 
not merely turn the impression of the afferent 
nerve on to the efferent nerve, but it takes 
some time to deliberate on the subject what 
it will do. In fact, it is only habit which will 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 49 

make a nerve centre work fast, a very impor- 
tant fact, as we shall soon see. Now, this 
arrangement is not one of a transitory kind, 
but obtains throughout all subsequent devel- 
opments. Let thousands of such nervous 
systems be joined together to make up, by 
their unison, the one grand system of man, 
yet from the lowest nerve centre in man up 
to the highest in his brain there is no reason 
to doubt that the mode of operation will still 
be the same in each. It is the law in nervous 
function that whatever new operations are 
developed or added no old or previous ones 
are superseded. 

The next # step in development is in the 
direction of multiplication of nerve centres, 
each with their indispensable afferent and 
efferent parts. But a new element now makes 
its appearance, namely, that, though their 
respective afferent and efferent nerves are 
never united, their nerve centres are so by 
fibres passing from centre to centre. These 
fibres are termed communicating fibres, and 
their business is to make the centres work 
together. This they do in two ways. One 



50 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOL OGY 

is that the afferent nerve of one centre will 
not only start up changes in its own centre, 
but its impression may run along the commu- 
nicating nerves to the other centres and, so 
to speak, touch them off too, causing them to 
all explode together, or one after the other, 
in a definite order. Thus, a single afferent 
impression, starting from the sensory fifth 
nerve in the nose, will start the nerve centres 
of some fifty-five pairs of muscles, each in its 
orderly succession, to execute a sneeze. 

But these communicating fibres act also in 
another and apparently reverse way — namely, 
the other centres may, through them, not only 
refuse to allow the original afferent impres- 
sion to go further, but may send back an order 
to the first centre that it should react to its 
afferent impression either not at all, or else 
only as they see fit, so to speak, that it should 
react. In other words, nerve centres control 
one another. 

This mutual restraining or controlling in- 
fluence of nerve centres upon each other by 
means of their communicating fibres intro- 
duces us to another and third grand element 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 5 I 

in nervous operations to which the term Inhi- 
bition is given. We find as a fact that as we 
rise in the animal scale and new parts are 
added to the nervous apparatus, with new and 
higher functions, that they assume the con- 
trol of their lower predecessors by this prop- 
erty of inhibition ; and so important becomes 
this element, as the system becomes more 
complex, that special nerves for inhibiting or 
controlling are often provided for the working 
of important parts. Thus the heart is stirred 
to activity by its appropriate efferent nerves ; 
but, at the same time, a very important effer- 
ent nerve also goes to the heart to make it 
beat slowly. Without inhibition, indeed, 
there could be no co-operation between nerve 
centres possible. This, too, is a universal 
law in the nervous system, and shows itself 
splendidly in the highest of nervous manifes- 
tations, that of human thought itself. What 
is a strong, well-disciplined mind but one in 
which inhibition, or the power of restraint, is 
greatly developed, for it is the very source of 
good judgment. 

After a certain number of nerve centres 



5 2 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIO LOG Y 

have become associated, according to the 
scale of the animal's development, we find 
that the mutual co-operation of the centres 
begins to be plainly more frequent in certain 
directions than in others ; that is, that it seems 
easier for the centres to act together, to exe- 
cute certain movements, than to execute other 
movements. When we come to examine why 
this is so, it becomes evident that it is 
because of the more frequent repetition of cer- 
tain afferent impressions than of other affer- 
ent impressions. Repeat one afferent im- 
pression a hundred times and another afferent 
impression only once, and the movements 
consequent on the first are plainly much more 
readily caused than those consequent on the 
unusual impression. Therefore we have 
come now upon another grand element in 
nervous operations, whose importance cannot 
be over-estimated, and that is Habit. The 
whole nervous system, indeed, is organized 
by habit. However complex, for example, 
be the movements executed by muscles in 
order to produce a given effect, such as 
movement of the eye-balls, some muscles con- 



OF THE NER VO US S YS TEM. 5 3 

tracting strongly, others most gently, others 
relaxing just enough to allow their opponents 
to contract just so much and no more — all 
these perfectly associated movements are 
nevertheless explicable only as the slowly 
acquired habits of the centres which supply 
those muscles with their motor nerves. But 
here comes the important question, how did 
these centres come to acquire these habits? 
The answer is from a thousand thousand 
times repeated afferent impressions, such as 
those of the afferent optic, or sense of sight 
nerve, in habituating the efferent or motor 
nerves of the eye muscles to act together. 

Physiologists, therefore, when they speak 
of nerve centres being organized to perform 
such and such functions, mean not that the 
nerve centres have been created so from the 
beginning, but that habit has so organized 
them. 

But the important principle to bear in mind 
just here is that it is the afferent segment of 
the nervous system, or that which is acted 
upon by impressions from the outside world, 
which is the ultimate source of habit, this 



54 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOGY 

great organizer and builder-up of the nervous 
system, and not the nerve centre itself, nor 
the efferent segment. This fact is one which 
materialists enjoy dilating upon, as indicating 
that mentally, as well as physically, we are 
created by our outside world, or, as it is 
termed, by our environment. 

We are soon to see that its completest illus- 
tration is to be found in the genesis of one of 
the loftiest and most intellectual and most ex- 
clusively human of the powers of the human 
mind. But we are much mistaken if habit, 
when it does then tell its whole story, will not 
make the materialists wish that they had not 
called it on the witness-stand. 

These remarks find a complete illustration 
in the structure and functions of the Spinal 
Cord in all vertebrates. The spinal cord, 
which is the original nervous system in every 
vertebrate, as it is the first to appear in its 
embryonic development, consists of a great 
number of nerve centres, one above the other, 
all receiving their afferent and giving off their 
efferent nerves on each side, and as constantly 
joined together by tracks of communicating 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 5$ 

fibres, until, finally, the whole muscular sys- 
tem of the body is found to be under its ex- 
clusive control. 

As we remarked before, no primary law or 
function in the nervous system is ever super- 
seded by any later developments, and so, how- 
ever great the additions be of brain centres 
or functions afterward, yet the spinal nerve 
centres retain all their original prerogatives, 
quite as much in man as in any of the rest. 
If you wish to show the cunning of your right 
hand in any work of skill, or the fluency of 
your speech with your tongue, your designing 
and talking brain has to ask the spinal nerve 
centres for the muscles of the hand and for 
the muscles of the tongue, to direct those 
muscles to do the work for it. 

Even the motor nerves of the muscles for 
moving the eyes, or for any expression of the 
face, are to be found running under the brain 
to their virtually spinal roots at the base of 
the skull. It is, therefore, when we sever the 
spinal cord from all connection with the brain 
(which we can do by decapitation in some 
animals), and yet have the headless body re- 



5 6 MA TERIALISM A ND MODERN PHYSIOL OGY 

tain its vitality long enough to enable us to 
experiment with it, that we learn how com- 
plete the organization of this spinal system is. 

Indeed it is startling to note then how per- 
fectly the operations of the body are carried 
on by a mechanism which certainly has no in- 
telligence or purpose direction in its actions, 
and which yet will work just as if a guiding 
brain was directing it. It is then that we dis- 
cover what a thorough organizer habit is. 
Thus, if a drop of an irritating acid be placed 
on the right flank of a headless frog he soon 
raises his right leg and gravely scratches 
away at it as if he felt the itching acutely. 
Now, hold his right leg so that he cannot 
scratch with it, and he seems much disturbed 
thereat, until finally he appears to conclude to 
bring up his left leg and cross it over to wipe 
the offending acid off. So with a decapitated 
snake ; a stick passed along its body will 
cause it to coil around it, just as when it had 
its head on, the only difference being that it 
will now do the same to its quick destruction 
around a red-hot poker. 

In structure the spinal cord has its centres, 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. S7 

or ganglia, as they are termed, located within, 
and like all ganglionic matter, they are of a 
gray color. There is a special arrangement, 
however, of its cells, according as they sub- 
serve an afferent or efferent function, the affer- 
ent cells of a more or less rounded shape being 
grouped more toward the posterior segment of 
the cord where the afferent nerves enter, and 
the cells with efferent functions, usually larger 
and of a stellate shape, being grouped to- 
ward the anterior segment, whence the motor 
nerves emerge. 

The rest and greater part of the bulk of 
the cord is made up of the white matter, 
which consists of tracts of nerve fibres, so col- 
ored by a sort of insulating material, which 
surrounds each nerve fibre in its course to or 
from a ganglion. At the top of the cord as 
it enters the skull is developed the final 
supreme centre of the entire system, the 
medulla oblongata — that fit and most responsi- 
ble ruler of the whole wonderful and beauti- 
fully regulated spinal mechanism — that centre 
in which a small injury would threaten life 
much more than it would in the brain, as it 



58 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIO LOG Y 

may cause instant death, for the medulla 
holds the reins of the pulse and the breath in 
its hands, while it acts, at the same time, as 
the intermediary between the various regions 
of the brain above and those of the spinal 
cord below 

So far, however, it must be said that we 
have nothing but mechanism pure and simple. 
For, when we examine the element of irrita- 
bility which is the initial phenomenon at the 
origin of an afferent nerve on the surface, 
and note its travels, with the subsequent 
efferent effect on the protoplasm of a muscle 
cell, we see but little difference in it from the 
familiar effect of touching a sensitive plant 
with its resultant shrinking of the leaves. 
The great difference lies in the incessant rep- 
etition of such afferent stimuli setting up, 
after awhile, in the nervous structure, a uni- 
form kind of reaction. 

But, after we pass the medulla oblongata, 
we find ourselves proceeding along large 
tracks of nerve fibres, which soon present us 
with a series of considerable swellings along 
their course, which are found to be altogether 




BRAIN OF A LAMPREY. 



OF THE NER VO US S YS TEM. 5 9 

new and differently constructed ganglia from 
those of the spinal cord. These new ganglia 
prove to be chiefly most portentous devel- 
opments of the afferent system, for they are 
no less than the centres of the special senses 
of sight, smell and hearing, larger or smaller, 
according to the needs of the animal for each 
sense respectively. 

Along with these, in the lower vertebrata, 
appear two swellings, which are relatively 
wonderfully small in many of these animals, 
considering their great import, but which are 
no less than the beginnings of the cerebral 
hemispheres, or what we call in ourselves the 
brain. In this figure, No. i, we have the 
sensory ganglia and the brain of a lamprey, a 
small fish often mistaken for an eel from his 
form, and which the cultured Romans used 
to prize so much that we read that the ac- 
complished literary critic, Asinus Pollio, in- 
vited Augustus Caesar and Maecenas to dine 
on them to judge what a nice flavor they had 
after being fed on cut-up slaves. 

You see those rounded masses, Ol, repre- 
sent his olfactory lobes, for his habits require 



60 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOG Y 

him to be good at smelling, though it should 
be remarked the Romans fed him on white 
slaves. Then these two large swellings be- 
low are his optic lobes, while those two insig- 
nificant spheres between, marked C, are his 
cerebral lobes or brains, or all that he has 
to c.ogitate with. Fig. 2 is the sensory and 
intellectual apparatus of a carp. He does 
not smell at all, so he has no olfactory lobes, 
but you see how large his optic lobes are 
compared with his brain or mental equipment. 

Here also is that old friend of the physi- 
ologist, the poor frog, experiments on whom 
have taught us more about ourselves than 
half the metaphysicians of history, and yet 
his mechanism for thinking, though larger 
than that of fishes, is scarcely larger than his 
optic lobes. M in each of these figures rep- 
resents the medulla. 

But a great subject arises here at once. 
Have we not here met with that great mys- 
terious something which we call Conscious- 
ness ? Of course we have. I cannot perceive 
how a special sense, such as sight or hearing, 
can imply anything else. The difficulty has 




BRAIN OF A CARP. 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 6 1 

been with many reasoners that they cannot 
sufficiently divest themselves of the ; associa- 
tions connected with the term consciousness, 
when applied to human beings, to judge cor- 
rectly of its actual presence in these lower 
vertebrate relatives of ours who, neverthe- 
less, must have some form of consciousness, 
however rudimentary their cerebral lobes are, 
for otherwise they could not see or hear. 

But when we come to the results of experi- 
ments, especially very recent ones which 
Prof. Ferrier in the Croonian lectures for 1890 
describes, we can have no question on the 
subject. When in osseous fishes, such as the 
carp, the ganglia, which correspond to the 
cerebral hemispheres, are removed there is 
little, if anything, to distinguish them from 
perfectly normal animals. They maintain 
their natural attitude, and use their tails and 
fins in swimming with the same vigor and 
precision as before. As Vulpian and Steiner 
have shown, they not only see, but are able to 
find their food. If worms are thrown into 
the water in which they are swimming they 
immediately pounce upon them. If a piece 



62 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOG V 

of string similar in size to a worm be thrown 
in they are able to detect the difference, and 
they drop it after having seized it. 

They even, to some extent, distinguish col- 
ors, for when one red and some white wafers 
are thrown into the water, the fish, almost 
invariably, selects the red in preference to 
the white. So also the frog. If care be taken 
to keep him alive, after the removal of his 
cerebral lobes, until he gets quite well from 
the injury, the recent experiments of Schrader 
show that brainless frogs will behave just like 
full-brained frogs under like circumstances. 
They crawled under stones or buried them- 
selves in the earth at the beginning of winter, 
and after the period of hibernation was over 
they came out and diligently caught the flies 
which were buzzing about in the vessels in 
which they were kept. 

As to birds, which are much higher in the 
scale of development than the amphibia, 
which the size of the cerebral lobes here in 
the pigeon well shows, yet, even in them, 
removal of their lobes did not in Schrader' s 
and Von Recklinghausen's experiments result 







BRAIX OF A PIGEON. 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM 63 

in making them entirely helpless, for they not 
only avoided obstacles in their path or in their 
flight, but appeared to fly from one place and 
alight securely on another. 

As we ascend from birds to mammals, how- 
ever, the development of the cerebral ganglia, 
as they are termed, grow from mere bulbous 
swellings into great masses, which cover more 
and more the sensory ganglia which we have 
been considering, until, in the monkey, these 
are wholly buried under their mass, with the 
exception of the cerebellum. In man even 
this exception no longer holds, and so insig- 
nificant relatively are those original centres, at 
the base of the skull, that we are accustomed 
to leave them out of consideration and to 
speak of his cerebral hemispheres as his brain. 

Being the terminal masses also of the ner- 
vous system, the gray matter in the brain is 
not surrounded by tracks of white fibres, but 
is spread out on the surface, and all the white 
fibres, both afferent and efferent, radiate from 
it down to form their connections with the 
basal ganglia and with the centres in the 
spinal cord. The gray matter in the higher 



64 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOG V 

animals is so abundant that it has to be thrown 
into folds to make room for it in the cavity of 
the skull, and hence occurs that appearance 
on the brain surface of eminences separated 
by depressions, to which the name of convolu- 
tions is given. 

In man they are extremely numerous, and, 
at first sight, so complex and irregular that 
it would seem hopeless to differentiate them. 
But a careful inspection shows that the 
deeper depressions are very uniform in their 
occurrence, so that the surface of the brain 
can by them be mapped out into definite con- 
volution areas, and, what is very interesting, 
the monkey also possesses them all, convolu- 
tion for convolution, identical with man's. 
More than that, the functions of the different 
convolutions, whether related to afferent or 
efferent duties, have been determined to a 
very considerable extent, so that we can fix, 
in the different series of the mammalia, the 
respective areas which correspond to the 
different functions in each, as, for example, 
the visual or sight-perceiving area in the rabbit, 
cat, dog, monkey and man. This enables us, 




T.RATX OF A FROG. 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 65 

by direct experiments on the brains of living 
animals, and in man by observing the locality 
of disease in certain definite parts, to come 
very close to well-demonstrated facts about 
many of the most important functions of the 
great physical organ of the mind. 

In plate 5 we have a diagram of the brain of 
brains, or that of man, which, as we remarked 
before, in its development overlaps everything. 
On this chart are represented the areas in the 
left hemisphere, which are the last material 
seat of the mental functions of perceiving and 
of doing — that is, of directing movements. 
The posterior lobes are largely taken up, as 
you see, with vision. The nerves of sight, 
after many communications with lower ganglia, 
finally end here. These lower lateral lobes, 
on the other hand, are occupied with the 
business of hearing. Above the deep depres- 
sion which bounds these hearing lobes comes 
the antero middle area, which subserves the 
great motor or efferent functions of the cere- 
brum, with the seats for moving the tongue, 
mouth, face, hands, fingers, arms and finally 
the lee, arranged in succession from below 



66 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYS10L0G Y 

upward. The areas for moving the eyes and 
head are above and in front of those for 
moving the arms, So well-defined are these 
different areas that we take advantage of this 
fact to locate exactly, and if need be to cut 
down upon each area when a spasm or paraly- 
sis in hand or foot indicates that we have a 
Corresponding mischief in the brain which 
a surgeon may remedy. The areas for the 
senses of smell and of touch and the motor 
areas for the trunk of the body cannot be 
shown in this chart, as they are on the lower 
and inner face of the hemisphere. 

Now, as regards the functions of the brain 
and their relations, the first conclusion we 
come to is that an unmistakable promotion, 
so to speak, has occurred in the mammalian 
brain of the great functions of sensation, 
consciousness and the power of directing 
movement, from the basal ganglia of fishes, 
amphibia and birds up to the great cerebral 
ganglia before us. Remove these from a 
mammal, as we have seen that we can do 
from the fish, frog and bird, and the mammal 
is then very far from acting as if he had still 



**<* 




'°l 



•AS) 



^, 



OF THE NER I T US S YS TEM. 6? 

the same degree of consciousness or power of 
movement left which those lower in the scale 
have. 

This does not prove that the cerebral gan- 
glia have entirely superseded the original 
basal ganglia, for facts of disease at the base 
of the brain and of the medulla in man, show 
that, even in him, these original nerve centres 
still hold much of their old relations. But 
the case is very much like the history of 
many a prosperous firm which began business 
in a very small way, and in humble quarters, 
and then when it branched out to an un- 
dreamed of extent from its lowly start, the 
highly trained heads of the firm are found to 
have moved up to large and commodious 
quarters on the upper floors, while the origi- 
nal routine work is yet done, as of old, in the 
story below. Habit, or routine, is quite 
enough now for the basal ganglia, while con- 
sciousness is needed to go up higher, where 
the vastly wider operations of mind have to 
be carried on. Nevertheless, it is the same 
old firm yet, for we will find that its princi- 
ples and modes of doing business, by the 



68 MATERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOGY 

heads of the establishment, have not changed, 
though they are now handling millions, where 
they used only to deal with a few dollars. 

We may think, for example, that in our- 
selves the majestic range of our memories, 
imaginations, feelings and ideas, must have a 
very different genesis and be according to 
very different laws from the simple^ uncon- 
scious functions of the first example of a 
nervous system which we described, but, a 
little attention to the source and sequence 
of our ideas, even when taking their most 
extensive range, will show a quite unmistak- 
able correspondence to the old original meth- 
ods of nervous business. 

A decisive illustration of this kind is fur- 
nished by the genesis of the great human 
faculty of speech. We need not waste time 
by saying that if human speech can be shown 
to be dependent on a nervous mechanism, 
located in the brain, which is as plainly made 
up of its afferent, centric and efferent parts as 
any centre in the spinal cord, that we need 
not seek to prove our proposition by any- 
thing else. Human speech ! What higher 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 69 

illustration of what mind is and does, can 
be named when we think of what has been 
said by human tongue or expressed in written 
word ? But human speech, even in those 
most gifted with it, can be both partially dis- 
ordered or utterly ruined by definite and 
strictly localized injuries in brain substance. 

A well-educated patient of mine found one 
morning, to her utter amazement, that she 
could not read a word in newspaper or book. 
Her attention was drawn to this strange fact 
by her trying to write a few sentences, which 
she did correctly enough, but then discovered 
that she could not read a word of what she had 
written. She thought at first that something 
had happened to her sight, but soon found that 
could not be so, for she could see everything 
but written or printed words as well as ever. 
Meantime, she could talk as fluently and with 
as clear understanding as ever she did. On 
the other hand, there are many recorded 
cases in medical literature of persons who 
could read as well as ever, but who, just as 
suddenly as in my patient's case, could not 
understand a word that was spoken to them. 



70 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOL OGY 

Their native language had become utterly 
foreign to them when uttered in their ears. 

These two derangements of speech, or 
" aphasias," as they are technically termed, are 
called respectively word-blindness and word- 
deafness ; the eye and the ear in typical cases 
being as good as all other eyes and ears for 
everything except words. Such cases of 
aphasia, therefore, prove beyond doubt that 
human speech has its afferent origins, one by 
the afferent acoustic nerve for spoken words, 
and the other by the afferent optic nerve, for 
reading and writing. In each case, -of course, 
they must be totally distinct in nature from 
each other. The sound of the word man and 
the appearance of the word man in writing 
must be so intrinsically different in nature 
that they must have very different places in 
the brain to correspond. 

And so they do. A sufficient number of 
post-mortem examinations have been made 
in cases of word-blindness and of word-deaf- 
ness to show just where the ear registers 
spoken words and just where the eye regis- 
ters the words which it reads. But much the 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. J I 

commonest form of aphasia is where the piti- 
able patient can both hear that which is read 
to him and what is put before him, with clear 
understanding, but, though (therefore) his 
language-hearing and language-seeing centres 
are unaffected, he is totally mute ; not a 
word comes from his tongue, when he tries to 
speak by it, nor a word to his hand when he 
tries to write by it. He can be addressed by 
others, but he cannot answer. Here it is out- 
going speech which is annihilated while in- 
going speech is preserved. But what is 
outgoing speech but efferent speech ? What 
is ingoing speech but afferent speech ? And, 
to make the demonstration complete, this 
efferent form of aphasia has its definite seat 
also, and now to be found, as it ought to be, 
in the motor or efferent region of the brain, 
in a convolution of the motor area called 
Broca's convolution, from a distinguished 
French physician who first identified it. 

Here, therefore, we have a complete demon- 
stration that one of the most intellectual 
endowments of man is dependent upon a per- 
fect piece of mechanism in his brain, arranged 



72 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOGY 



like all other nervous mechanisms down to 
the lowest in the nervous system. We also 
find that we can damage that mechanism, 
piece by piece, and thus damage speech piece 
by piece as well. Certainly this looks very 
much like things intellectual depending on 
material structure. But more of this is to 
come yet. 

We have omitted to say before that the 
brain is divided into two symmetrical halves, 
and that the right brain receives all the sen- 
sation from, and governs all the ovluntary 
movements of the left half of the body, while 
the left brain similarly receives the feeling 
and governs the right side of the body, the 
afferent and efferent fibres for both these 
functions from each hemisphere crossing'over 
to the other side at the base of the skull, in 
the medulla and in the cord. Now it happens 
that it is the left brain centres only, in the 
great majority of persons, that have anything 
to do with speech. But not in all persons. 
In some persons it is the perfectly correspond- 
ing right brain centres which have to do with 
language, and not at all the left. This is a 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. J$ 

very significant exception. What does it 
mean ? 

It means this, that when the speech centres 
are disordered in the left brain, those persons 
were right-handed, and when it is the right 
brain centres that talk, then those persons are 
left handed. But what has right or left hand- 
edness to do with the origin of speech, so that 
the left brain speaks in right-handed and the 
right brain in left-handed persons ? 

Here comes our old friend Habit again, and 
he says, most truly, I am the organizer of 
everything in brain as well as in spinal cord. 
I found these human beings wanting extremely 
to talk, and they began to use their right 
hands in gesticulating to make their wants 
known to their fellow human beings. So next 
to the brain centres for moving the hands and 
arms were the centres for moving the muscles 
of the face and mouth, and hence, as they 
tried to talk with the hands and arms, so they 
then added making faces to making gestures. 
But the centres for the muscles of the mouth 
are also near neighbors to those of the tongue, 
and, so in time, they added the wagging of 



74 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOGY 

their tongues to their gestures and grimaces, 
and, having begun on the right side of their 
bodies and the left side of their brains, they 
have kept on doing so, by my direction, ever 
since. But those originally left-handed fel- 
lows, of course, started with their left hands 
and hence in them I have organized their 
corresponding right brain centres. There are 
whole nations and races still who are practis- 
ing my original lessons with gestures in talk- 
ing to as full an extent as with their tongues. 
Thus the Aino of Japan says man with his 
tongue, but when it is accompanied with a 
mean gesture, he means woman ; and when a 
Frenchman or an Arab is talking, how much 
of what he says would be left out if he did not 
gesture ? 

So it seems that habit has organized human 
speech, as a material mechanism, just as he 
organized a spinal centre, and much, there- 
fore, have the materialists made out of his 
testimony. But it is our turn now to cross- 
examine him. Habit, you always work with 
an afferent impression, not so ? Yes, always 
with incessant outside impression. Well, 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 75 

when you started to teach the left convolu- 
tions to talk, where did you get your afferent 
impressions from ? Well, to say the truth, I 
had to get them all from inside, in nine cases 
out of ten. What do you mean by getting 
the teaching afferent impressions from inside ? 
Why, that these human beings had mean- 
ings or ideas to express first and efferent 
gestures afterward, then they also had mean- 
ings first and grimaces afterward, and then 
again they had meanings first and sound- 
words afterward, and finally, after a long while, 
they devised visible forms for eye-words ; that 
is to say, that meaning preceded gesture, 
grimace and sound, just as meaning preceded 
the symbols of written words. You say then 
that you did not teach them by the afferent 
sense of hearing sounds first, and then after- 
ward they got to know the sounds had mean- 
ing ? No, I teach parrots sounds first, and then 
they slowly find that the sounds have mean- 
ings, but human beings always mean some- 
thing first and try to talk afterward. Their 
language, therefore, is always by symbols, 
which are nothing in themselves any more 



j6 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIO LOG Y 

than a paper dollar is anything more in 
itself than a piece of printed paper. That is 
why I cannot teach language to other animals 
than human beings, because they haven't 
enough inside their heads to make symbols 
with. No — not a symbol ! Dogs can only 
bark or whine forever in the same way, but 
men never end in making a Babel of languages, 
because their languages are made up of per- 
fectly arbitrary symbols utterly disconnected 
with the outside world. 

To drop this metaphor we may point out, 
in the first place, that Broca's convolution in 
the other half of the brain never learns to 
utter a word. In a right-handed person who 
speaks our language, his right Broca's con- 
volution can no more speak English than it 
can Siamese, for when his left speech-express- 
ing centre is diseased he becomes totally 
speechless. The reason is that speech is not 
the original endowment of either these left or 
right brain centres, but has been acquired by 
one of them through teaching, and that 
teacher, as always in the nervous system, is 
early habit by some means started as such, 



OF THE NER VO US S YS TEM. 7 7 

The fact that it is started according to the 
most used hand, and not according to a 
superior original endowment of the centre, is 
proved by the absence of the slightest sign of 
difference between this pair of centres in pri- 
mary endowments, for otherwise the unused 
centre would show some capacity for speech, 
instead of none at all, just as the left eye and 
left ear are not appreciably inferior to their 
more used fellows. We may also point out 
that this anatomical fact completely disposes 
of what is called the bow-wow theory of the 
origin of language, as it shows that human 
language did not begin with a series of imita- 
tive ejaculatory sounds, but with the use of 
the hand in gesticulation. But the use of the 
hand is a purely efferent act. The source of 
this act must, therefore, be looked for within 
the consciousness, and not from outside. 

When the hungry Stanley tried to converse 
with a Congo tribe, as he describes the scene, 
he pressed his stomach, brought his right 
hand up to his mouth, opened that and made 
a series of woebegone grimaces with his face, 
ere he pressed his collapsed stomach again. 



J 8 MA TERIA LISM A ND MODERN PH YS10L OGY 

Certainly the sounds which these Congoites 
made as words ranor in his ears, but what use 
were those afferent impressions compared 
with his most efferent gestures? But those 
most expressive gestures had a meaning pre- 
cede them in his brain, and so all linguistic 
signs, gesticulated, spoken or written, have to 
be preceded by truly centric purposes. 

This centric origin of languages is testified 
to also by other facts of disease. Thus, it is 
common for whole classes of words to be lost 
in some forms of aphasia, while other classes 
remain. I have a patient now who has lost 
all her nouns in a batch, but has retained her 
verbs. On showing her a pen and asking her 
what it was, she answered, " What write 
with" ; then a scissors, she answered, "What 
cut with." So it is usual to find in such 
cases a significant order in which words are 
lost. 

Thus a speechless patient was brought to 
my college clinic whose case, on examination, 
I said was probably quite curable, and, after 
he withdrew, I told the class that we would 
see, if he was cured, whether he would not 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. ;g 

recover his language first with prepositions 
and participles, then the verbs would come 
back, and last of all the nouns. And so in 
time it proved. He first uttered "up," 
"down," "in" and "out," then, after some 
weeks, he began to get back his verbs, and 
last of all his nouns. The explanation is 
this: 

Verbs are the names applied to events of 
personal experience, such as " I am." " I 
heard," " I felt," etc. We have the per- 
sonal experience within us first, and, there- 
fore, we conceive of verbs first. It is after 
this inner experience that we then settle what 
we see or what we hear or feel, which, of 
course, is itself an object external to us, and 
hence named after the experience as a thing 
or noun. Proper names or names of persons, 
for example, are just as much nouns as any 
other nouns, but, because they are learned 
last, they are the first to be forgotten. 

And so nouns in general, because they are 
learned last, that is, after verbs, being more 
exterior than verbs, are forgotten before 
verbs. 



80 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOG Y 

Anyone who finds himself at a loss for a 
word may prove this for himself, by discover- 
ing that the wished-for word is very rarely a 
verb, but almost always a " what you may call 
it," namely, a noun. 

But deeper down than verbs, and far more 
exclusively human than anything else, is the 
truly wonderful preposition. It is neither the 
name of an object nor of an experience. It 
is that which only the royal mind of man 
could think of making a symbol for, and it 
testifies to what he is, for it denotes a purely 
abstract relation, and only man can conceive 
of abstract relations. 

With his prepositions he can step easily 
from one end of the mental world to the 
other, using only one noun as his staff. 
Thus scriptio is a noun, "a writing," but an 
ascription is not a conscription, nor a de- 
scription, nor that an inscription, nor is a 
prescription a proscription, nor a superscrip- 
tion a subscription. But where could Habit, 
with its outside teaching apparatus, find a 
way to those depths of human consciousness 
which begin to perceive relations with the 



OF THE NEK VO US S YS TEM. 8 1 

earliest perceptions of anything? If Broca's 
convolution is taught by habit, as it evidently 
is, where is the real teacher who incessantly 
keeps up the deep habitual working ? The 
only answer is, conscious impulse from within, 
not surface impression from without. 

It is vain, therefore, for writers to urge that 
monkeys and dogs can be made to under- 
stand language, and that monkeys can even 
learn to utter word-meaning sounds. For no 
one doubts that these animals can be taught 
tricks, and why not sound-tricks also, espe- 
cially when emphasized with tone and visible 
sign which they carefully watch in the master's 
face and hand ? But the argument is that 
man does not need a representative anything 
from his external world for him to make his 
words out of, so that if ever human speech 
began with representative sounds, it soon 
stepped freely away to arbitrary symbolic 
sounds, invented, not imitated. Let our ex- 
perimenters, therefore, instead of setting ani- 
mals to imitate, set them to invent words, for 
that would decide whether the origin of Ian- 
gauge is external or internal. Where, for ex- 



8 2 MA TERTALISM AND MODERN PHYSIO LOG Y 

ample, did the Arabs get out of their dull camel 
the more than a thousand names in their lan- 
guage for him ? The monkey has Broca's con- 
volution identical with man's, but what is there 
in him to teach it ? The source of true sym- 
bolic speech is as limited in him as the capac- 
ity for the invention of quaternions, for the 
power to conceive the question "how" (not 
why,) enough to choose a symbol for it, carries 
with it the power ultimately to weigh the fixed 
stars. 

But the materialist now starts on his search 
for this great source of mental manifestation 
and begins by pointing out that the brain of 
man is very large and very convoluted. It is 
true that modern physiologists have used up 
the greater part of the surface of the brain by 
appropriating most of its areas to purely sen- 
sory functions behind, motor functions to the 
middle and the front, and leaving only the ex- 
treme anterior lobules for something not yet 
demonstrated. But then, reasoning from the 
facts of comparative anatomy, do we not find 
that the size of the cerebral hemispheres and 
the number of their convolutions are in direct 



OF THE NEK VO US S YS TEM. 8 3 

proportion to the increase in intellectual func- 
tion and power? Certainly we do, but not, 
however, that the mental endowments both in 
degree and in quality will depend upon the 
amount and elaboration of nervous matter. 
For the argument is — the more brain matter 
you have and the better it is organized, the more 
mind you will have and the better developed 
it will be. Add more wires to your Eolian 
harp and you will have more music by half 
than when you have only half the number of 
wires. But, alas ! there is one anatomical 
fact which, at a single swoop, will cut down 
this theory to its roots, leaving only a stump 
for anything to grow out of it again, and even 
then it must be much modified from its origi- 
nal shape. 

That fact is this : We have all along been 
using incorrect language in speaking of the 
brain as if it were a single organ like the liver 
or spleen. We, as everybody else does, have 
done so simply for convenience, as we say 
that the sun rises and sets, when, in fact, he 
never does either. What we should, in ac- 
curacy, say, is our brains, for there are two of 






84 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PH YSIOL OGY 

them, like our two eyes, and our two ears, 
and, like those pair organs, they exactly cor- 
respond, lobe for lobe, convolution for con- 
volution and fissure for fissure. 

But, as a distinguished physiologist writes, 
as far as mental manifestations are concerned, 
we are totally in the dark what we have two 
brains for. But if we do not know for what 
mental purpose we have two brains, we can at 
once say that we know what they are not for. 
They are not to double our mental capacity, 
nor does one brain add a single new faculty 
to what the other has, nor a new power, ex- 
cept as in speech, when one has gained a fac- 
ulty by habitual use as an instrument. But 
the corresponding parts of the other brain 
could gain the same faculty, if only they were 
so used from early life. 

When not used as instruments, therefore, 
both brains are exactly alike, and can do no 
more than other pair organs in their working. 
There is, hence, no more reason to conclude 
that the right brain can, by native endow- 
ments, do some thinking which it can add to 
the left brain's thinking, than to suppose that 



OF THE NER VO US S YS TEM. 8 5 

one eye can see blue and the other eye see red, 
or that a man can turn one ear to hear English 
and the other ear to hear French. But from the 
materialist's point of view, if you double the 
quantity of brain matter you double the think- 
ing stuff. That would be like giving a man 
two stomachs. Our one stomach has over five 
million gastric follicles to secrete gastric juice 
with. Now, if he had two stomachs, he could 
have over ten millions of these glands to make 
just so much more gastric juice with. He 
could then digest two dinners instead of one. 
Is quantity of cerebral matter, therefore, like 
this ? Or if a man should lose one of his two 
brains would he thereby lose half his con- 
sciousness or thought ? The facts of disease 
indeed show that we have two brains just as 
we have two eyes. One eye can do all the 
seeing if necessary. It is only as a matter 
of convenience that we have two eyes, 
not because they see anything, but because 
they are the instruments of sight, and on 
account of their position simply is it a 
great convenience to have two instruments ex- 
actly alike (because they work exactly alike) 



86 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOG Y 



than to have only one. The same may be 
said of the two ears. Why, therefore, may 
not these two brains that are exactly alike, 
be also the two instruments, and nothing 
more than the instruments, of conscious- 
ness ? 

We come now, in conclusion, to the last 
great problem which nervous function pre- 
sents, and to judge which path of inference 
it indicates that we should choose. It is 
impossible to overlook this problem in the 
consideration of the nature of consciousness, 
because it is stamped with the attribute of in- 
variability, and invariability is always of funda- 
mental import in whatever connection it 
occurs. In every discussion, therefore, the 
strategic importance, so to speak, of the inva- 
riable, should always be appreciated, for a little 
reconnoitering may show that it dominates 
the whole field. Now, such an invariable ele- 
ment is found in the facts of personal con- 
sciousness, perfectly unique in kind among all 
the facts of life, and never-failing in its occur- 
rence, and that fact is that consciousness is 
always intermittent. There is no such thing 



OF THE NER VO US S YS TEM. 8 7 

as continuous consciousness. Instead of that, 
at definite intervals it absolutely ceases. 

The great bearing of this fact on the whole 
subject under discussion is shown at once by 
asking this question, Is sleep abolition of con- 
sciousness, or withdrawal of consciousness — 
which ? If abolition, then sleep, so far as 
personal consciousness is concerned, is inter- 
mittent death. If so, then death itself is 
truly unending sleep. But if in sleep, the 
consciousness only withdraws for a time 
from its relation to a material organism, so 
may death itself be but a sleep in the sense 
of being the withdrawal of the personal 
consciousness from a material organism, and 
nothing - more. 

But, first, we said that this fact about con- 
sciousness is unique. Some may suppose 
that the whole body sleeps as consciousness 
does. It does nothing of the kind, it only 
rests, which is a very different thing, and it 
does not do even that in those parts which 
the consciousness does not use. It is signifi- 
cant that only those parts and those organs 
which consciousness has been employing and 



88 MATERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOGY 

dominating grow weary and worn and cry 
for rest. Everything else, and particularly 
in the nervous mechanism, which conscious- 
ness does not interfere with, goes on working 
without needing any rest. There is the me- 
dulla. What an immense labor it keeps on 
performing uninterruptedly, equal to raising 
500 pounds an inch with each deep breath, 
while the body is supposed to be sleeping. 
We have also heard that flowers sleep. We 
might as well say that a room sleeps when it 
is dark, for flowers close up only when the 
stimulus of light is withdrawn. No, it is con- 
sciousness alone which sleeps. Certainly no 
other process of life shows anything like true 
sleep. Nutritive processes whether for re- 
pair or for growth, instead of ceasing in the 
quiet of night, are quite as active, if not more 
so, then. The circulation goes on just the 
same. The rest also which organs seem to 
take when their work is done, as when the 
stomach is through with its task and remains 
empty, is certainly not sleep, but simply be- 
cause for the time no more added nutriment 
is needed. But consciousness does not cease 






OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 89 

because no more consciousness is needed. It 
ceases simply and solely because its presence 
is fatiguing. 

Nothing else in life fatigues but it. We 
might, therefore, impersonate the brain as 
speaking to consciousness thus : See here, 
Consciousness, we have to come to some un- 
derstanding about our mutual relations. You 
are the only fatiguing quantity in the case. 
Especially your recent portentous develop- 
ment which you call the Will, is perfectly 
unbearable to all my old faithful nerve cen- 
tres, any of whom can jog along without 
once complaining in their work, but so soon 
as this will of yours commences to intermed- 
dle with them, they begin to know what 
fatigue is. Here is my tireless medulla, if 
your will begins to order him in his business, 
and tells him how to breathe according to will 
and not according to his old director, Habit, 
he becomes exhausted in less than half an 
hour. I cannot even wag a little finger 
steadily by the will for twenty minutes with- 
out the spinal cord sending word that it is 
more fatigued by that small muscular work 



90 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOGY 

than by working the big diaphragm for a 
week. Therefore, we must arrange that you 
will have nothing to do with me for at least 
one-third of the term allotted for our co- 
partnership, so that I may have time to 
recover from your presence. 

This great fact of life indicates that con- 
sciousness is to the brain what the rider is to 
his horse. While he directs the horse in all 
his ways, he is neither the horse, nor a con- 
stant part of the horse, but so different from 
him that it is his burden which wears the 
animal out and makes it necessary that he 
should dismount at stated intervals and let 
the horse alone. 

It is only on that account that conscious- 
ness ceases, for cease it does, absolutely. 
There are many loose ideas about conscious- 
ness in sleep, for many persons, deceived by 
its complete return after sleep, imagine that 
it only apparently ceases during sleep, and 
that somehow it hangs around, as active. as 
ever, only that we do not know it. But if it 
hangs around, as in dreaming, then it is not 
real sleep. Good, healthy sleep involves 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 



nothing more nor less than true absence of 
consciousness from the brain. 

Now, what does this invariable fact about 
consciousness mean ? Only two answers can 
be given to this question, and only one of 
them can be true. One is that personal con- 
sciousness, meaning by that the sum total of 
sensation, perception, emotion, thought and 
will, " the individual, in fact," is a function of 
the material brain, and, therefore, the product 
of molecular vibrations in brain matter which 
have to be periodically suspended in sleep or 
the molecules get out of order by too inces- 
sant use in that particular way. When the 
molecules, therefore, do get so out of order, 
consciousness is abolished. But we must in- 
sist on a correct use of the term brain, now, 
and remember that consciousness wears out 
not the whole brain, but only some of the 
upper ganglia, perhaps of only one hemi- 
sphere at a time, flitting from the left to the 
riodit brain as most convenient. 

We ask next, does not this hypothesis ne- 
cessitate the statement that every time a 
Shakespeare, a Napoleon, a Lincoln, a Com- 



92 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIO LOG Y 

modore Vanderbilt, or a Helmholtz awoke 
from sleep he was virtually recreated again, 
or at least came into existence from non- 
existence once more ? In answer to this, the 
Eolian harp illustration, of course, must be 
used, though we seemed to have done with it 
when the anatomical fact of doubling the 
wires with two brains showed no increase in 
the music. According to its analogy, the 
wires may be conceived of as becoming so 
shrunken by the cold of the air currents that 
their molecular arrangements became de- 
ranged and the harp had to be withdrawn till 
the wires resumed their normal temperature 
and tone again, when the harp would be just 
the same as it was before. But does this 
analogy give us the simplest explanation of 
the two at this particular juncture ? 

We must leave our hearers to judge. The 
violin analogy is that the musician simply 
lays his instrument down, to take it up after- 
ward, the same musician as before. Once 
again, let us here interpose that the violin it- 
self behaving badly sometimes, and therefore, 
thus affecting the music, has nothing to do 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 93 

with the question of the existence of an in- 
dependent musician ; for, if, when he tries to 
play with it, he finds that some one has put 
beeswax on the strings instead of rosin, the 
consequent poor music does not go to prove 
either that he is a poor musician, or that 
there is no musician. The argument often 
harped upon by materialists that material 
changes in the brain are accompanied by cor- 
responding changes in mental manifestations, 
has been answered often enough already, and 
has no place now. 

The question now is, which analogy, that 
of the Eolian harp, or that of the violin and 
its musician, best explains awakening from 
sleep ? We incline strongly to the latter, for 
these brief reasons : The Eolian harp, when 
it awakens, gives out only one kind of music. 
It is inconceivable, in the true sense of the 
word, how it could be arranged so as to vary 
as the violin does when the musician has hold 
of it. Could it be arranged to play one sym- 
phony from Beethoven and then right after- 
ward one from Mozart, and the overture of 
Tannhauser next ? The range of sympho- 



94 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOGY 

nies which this human violin plays, every time 
it comes back to consciousness, are varied to 
infinity. Have the brain fibres, meanwhile, 
in sleep, been varied likewise to infinity ? 

Every one instinctively feels when con- 
fronted with the practically infinite in human 
consciousness, that the material element in 
the question is hopelessly inadequate to carry 
us far toward an answer. We have found 
how emphatically this has been said by Tyn- 
dall, by Allison, and admitted even by 
Romanes and by Huxley, that the chasm of 
the difference between the sleeping brain and 
the conscious brain is impassable by any 
material bridge. Consciousness is absent in 
the one case and present in the other, and 
when it is present can the universes wide range 
of human thought be solely and exclusively 
dependent on the arrangement of those col- 
lections of nerve fibres and nerve cells, which 
after all are just those of the chimpanzee ? 

If the facts of human personality depend 
upon fibre and cell for thought and action, 
where are the fibres, cells, and convolutions 
added to those of the chimpanzee to corre- 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 95 

spond to the thoughts of the genius in mathe- 
matics, in statesmanship, in commerce, in 
engineering, in invention, in art, in poetry, in 
science, in philosophy and in the rest of the 
great consciousnesses of the great human 
world ? 

No, the facts of sleep and awakening point 
more, in our opinion, to a visitor from the out- 
side who can take up one of the two instru- 
ments, as he chooses, in the human music 
hall, and can play with them any variety of 
melodies, because it is he and not the instru- 
ment who is the real cause of the music. But 
certain facts of physiology oblige us to change 
our figure somewhat. Consciousness is called 
back from sleep by afferent impressions. It 
is very" much like ringing up the clerk in a 
central office station by so many telephones. 
Late at night, after incessant ringing all day 
by different wires, he says : " That last ring 
is through the ear station, and it sounds 
twelve o'clock. I will shut up the office now 
and go, though it is not I, but the batteries 
which are getting exhausted. When they are 
re-charged by morning let them ring me up 



g6 MA TERIALISM A ND MODERN PHYSIOL OGY 

again." It is the afferent that brines the con- 
sciousness to its present earthly business place. 

A boy in Germany attracted much atten- 
tion among biologists because he had lost all 
sense of smell, of hearing, and all sense of 
touch or feeling, and the sight of one eye. 
His afferent impressions were therefore all 
gone except that of sight by one eye. As 
soon as that was closed, he at once dropped 
to sleep. Did his personal existence, there- 
fore, depend wholly on that one eye ? or does 
not his case rather show that the personality 
simply has to have at least one point of con- 
tact with the material organism, and that it 
can get along even with only one ? 

That outside visitor, so unlike everything 
in the material machine that it is only his 
coming and working it which wears it out, is 
objected to by Romanes and Huxley because 
they dislike the name spirit. The thing it- 
self meanwhile they are constantly talking 
about. It is the name spirit which they try 
to down. Call it psychic force, or some such 
name, and very probably they would be satis- 
fied. Romanes says to talk of it acting on 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. Qj 

the brain is to interfere with the conservation 
of energy ; as if the whole energy in a 
machine cannot be conserved, and yet that 
energy be divested from without by a child's 
finger pressing a button. Huxley objects to 
it because he cannot think of it as something 
carried under a man's hat, but devoid of rela- 
tion to space, indivisible even in thought, and 
yet in that place and possessed of half a 
dozen faculties, and yet having not even a 
geometrical figure ! Well, a piece of iron has 
something in it which makes it point to one 
star in the heavens, to the salvation of every 
ship, but it is shut up in a small box, which 
may be hung to a watch chain ; it serves great 
purposes, and yet that something in it is indi- 
visible and has no relation to any of the three 
dimensions of space, and, finally, it has no 
geometrical figure ! The simple truth is that 
we are not half so helpless about our infer- 
ences as to the independent existence of 
mind, as the congenitally blind man is as to 
the methods of spectroscopic investigation. 

With one illustration we now end. A 
piece of money is one of the smallest things 



98 MATERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOGY 

made by man, but how much does it testify 
to in him, as a creature with laws, fixed insti- 
tutions and ideas of value utterly beyond the 
highest mental ranee of the most intelligent 
brute ! Lately a statesman stood up at a fes- 
tive gathering to speak of the most compli- 
cated questions connected with the standards 
of value, which would affect the wondrously 
complicated interests of 60,000,000 of a most 
intelligent people. How much was that 
brain thinking about just then ! But sud- 
denly the tongue faltered, he fell, and in a 
moment he was gone. Now in all this world 
of great chanees.no change is so great a s this 
between the brain just before, and just after 
that fall ! Physiologists, we have seen, admit 
that they cannot tell what the essential 
change was there, even in the material part. 
We prefer to say, in the sense of the words 
as they occur in those sacred pages, in which 
so often we seem to read what could only 
come from beyond the limited horizon here, 
-He fell asleep!" 

To sum up. The writers from whom we 
have quoted, emphatically tell us that as biol- 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 99 

ogists they cannot pronounce mind to be the 
product of matter or of energy (force), be- 
cause neither of these factors can be com- 
pounded into consciousness. They tell us 
that consciousness is so generically distinct 
from matter and force that not a single anal- 
ogy can be instituted between it and them, 
much less a casual relationship. We con- 
clude, therefore, by every rule of thought and 
lang-uaee, that each of these three must be 
distinct realities, for if one is not the other it 
must be itself, and does not lose anything of 
its own by entering into relations with the 
other. But when we draw this natural infer- 
ence of the independent, as well as the rela- 
tional, existence of mind, our authorities 
become much confused. Romanes says that 
to speak of mind acting on the material brain 
is nonsense, while Huxley says that con- 
sciousness is a function of the brain. Both 
agree, however, that consciousness cannot be 
a separate entity, for that would be equiva- 
lent to admitting that there is such a thinor as 
spirit. With Huxley, a spirit is incon- 
ceivable, because he cannot conceive of any- 



IOO MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOG Y 

thing apart from qualities, and as he thinks 
that a spirit is something apart from every 
quality, material or otherwise, he finds this 
name leads him into an intellectual vacuum. 
Romanes, on the other hand, equally reject- 
ing spirit, finds a restful conclusion in the In- 
explicable. The reader, having kept their 
company for some distance, is then told that 
they decline to go beyond the conceivable 
and the knowable, for science deals only with 
what is so, and it is well and wise to recog- 
nize when we can be knowing ones no longer, 
and must be content to remain unknowing 
or agnostic. 

All this would be well if these gentlemen 
had been talking of things knowable. They 
rarely have done this, however, and, instead, 
only of things inferential. But inference is 
always provisional, never final. Any new 
fact added to the bases of inference may re- 
quire an entirely new re-arrangment of the 
inferences. Thus scholars long inferred that 
the Homeric poems were not reduced to 
writing till the age of Pisistratus, but this 
theory has been materially affected by the 



OF THE NER VO US S YS TEA/. I O I 

recent discovery that ancient Greek colonists 
in Egypt used writing as far back as the 
reputed age of Homer himself. Now, with 
the fact obstinately remaining that mind is a 
great reality, Huxley himself often maintain- 
ing that it is the first of all realities, what is 
there inconceivable about its separate exist- 
ence, merely because we are unacquainted, at 
present, with the conditions of such a sepa- 
rate existence ? On account of that one de- 
ficiency, must we suspend further inferences 
and return to matter and force, which already 
we have been told can, give no intimation 
of what mind is, although we know that there 
must be such a thine as mind? Should we 
not rather be sure that all bases for inference 
in our subject are exhausted before we agree 
thus to leave off with no conclusion whatever ? 
Certainly we do not see why the word " in- 
conceivable " should act on us as a spell 
now, when no biologist allows himself to be 
daunted by it in other investigations. For 
does inconceivableness arise only here and 
nowhere else? Not to speak of mind, how 
conceivable, in any sense of the word, is the 



1 02 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOGY 



relation of life itself to matter ? Thus with a 
whale, great as his relations to matter are 
full grown, yet, like every other 



when 



is 



he begins his individual life with 



no 



he 
mammal, 

more matter than a bacterium, for, however 
uncountable the millions of the cells of his 
adult body be, he commences as a unicellular 
being. Yet he is as much a whale when he 
is microscopic in size as ever he will be after- 
wards. In fact, when his material body is 
too small to be seen by the naked eye, dwell- 
ing in an ocean of food, the size of a pin's 
head, he is a greater living thing than when 
his bulk is more than that of two thousand 
men, because by that time he has outlived 
most of the capacities which were in that van- 
ishing speck of matter with which he began. 
In that, little mass of protoplasm there was 
something which not only determined how 
every cell in his future body should come 
into being, even as parts of legs and feet 
which he would never use throughout his life 
but keep tucked up deep within his body; 
but, doubtless, also that he should develop 
some things derived, not from his parents, 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 1 03 

but from his grandparents. Moreover, these 
were not mere potential properties of his uni- 
cellular body, but parts as actual as that one 
atom of hydrogen and one of oxygen, and 
not one of nitrogen, are united in a molecule 
of water, for not only, is it impossible that 
this material speck should grow into a bird, 
or even into a fish, but perhaps a mistake, so 
to speak, has already occurred in it, which 
will develop a hereditary tumor in him after he 
is full-orown. Such biological facts about the 

o o 

relations of life to matter are to be accepted 
doubtless, because they are so conceivable ! 
The truth is, that whatever reasons there be, 
and they are many, why we properly should 
confess ignorance or agnosticism about the 
relations of life and of mind to matter, of the 
conscious to the unconscious, inconceivable- 
ness of the conditions is about the last con- 
sideration to be adduced and the least worthy 
to weigh in the problem.* 



* Here is the latest dictum from a scientific quarter on this 
subject : 

" The influence of animal or vegetable life on matter is infinitely 
beyond the range of any scientific inquiry hitherto entered on. Its 



104 MATERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOGY 

2. We object to consciousness being regarded 
as a function of brain matter, because no ma- 
terialist could ask for more than such an ad- 
mission. Such an admission involves the 
conclusion that the brain is not the instru- 
ment, but the cause of consciousness. Noth- 
ing can be both an instrument of a thing and 
the cause of that thing, also. Steam causes 
the engine to work, but its instrument, the 
engine, does not cause steam. Now the 
brain mechanism is as much built up by food 
as the muscular and the glandular mechan- 
isms are, and the source of the energy shown 
in their function or working, is in each equally 
to be traced to the alimentary canah If mind, 
therefore, instead of using the nervous mech- 
anism as its instrument, is rather produced by 
the working or function of the brain, then 
mind is ultimately the product of eating and 



power of directing the motions of moving particles, in the demon- 
strated daily miracle of our human free will, and in the growth of 
generation after generation of plants from a single seed, are infinitely 
different from any possible results of the fortuitous concourse of 
atoms. The real phenomena of life infinitely transcend human 
science." — Sir William Thomson, now Lord Kelvin, President of 
the Royal Society. Article in the Fortnightly Review, March, 1892 



OF THE NEK VO US S VS TEM. I O 5 

drinking. On the other hand, that indices- 
tion may affect both feeling and thought is no 
evidence against the brain being only the 
instrument of mind, for the working of any 
instrument is affected by disorder of its 
proper conditions.*. 

3. Inspection of the nervous mechanism 
from its simplest and lowest example to its 
highest, shows that it is purely a mechanism. 
From first to last it is a machine, and there- 
fore while giving evidence in its most perfect 
forms of the presence of consciousness, so, like 
any mechanism, it does not afford the slightest 
clue as to the nature of that which works it, 
namely, the consciousness, any more than an 

* Dr. J. Hughlings Jackson, F. R. S., the distinguished English 
neurologist, though he presses to an extreme, as I think, some evo- 
lutionary hypotheses, in explanation of certain nervous disorders, 
nevertheless remarks on this subject : 

" Function is a physiological term, and it is, I submit, improper to 
speak of states of consciousness as being ' functions of the brain ' ; 
we can only say that states of consciousness attend functions of the 
brain, of those parts of it, at least, which are the highest cerebral cen- 
tres .... It is not the mind, but the physical basis of mind, which 
is a product of evolution. It is the organ of mind, not the mind, 
which, being an evolution out of the rest of the body, is representative 
of it." — " Lectures on the Comparative Study of Diseases of the Ner- 
vous System," British Medical Journal, Aug. 17, 1889. 



106 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOG Y 

engine reveals the engineer. This is illus- 
trated by the intellectual faculty of speech. 
This human faculty is as much dependent on 
a mechanism in the brain as the breathing is 
on a mechanism in the medulla, and therefore 
may be specifically deranged according to 
specific anatomical changes. But different 
from the nervous respiratory mechanism, the 
speech mechanism owes its origin, elaboration 
and perfection wholly to the consciousness. 
It is not born with any human being, and 
therefore differs fundamentally from the 
means of communication by sounds of other 
animals, who communicate with each other 
by sounds which are the same for the same 
species wherever they are ; or in other words, 
they are born with them. The human con- 
sciousness, on the contrary, selects one of two 
exactly similar regions of the brain which it 
trains as instruments of speech. Which of 
the two is determined by the accident of the 
most used hand when communication with 
others was first attempted by gesture. But 
human speech indicates its high and sole 
source in the unapproachable human con- 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 107 

sciousness, by its actively inventive, instead 
of its passively imitative, character, by which 
it is enabled to choose perfectly arbitrary 
symbols for its terms. Hence the endless 
variety and change of human languages. 
Thus it has been estimated that among savage 
peoples, whose languages are not preserved by 
writing, the lapse of only ninety years suffices 
to make unintelligible the speech of their 
predecessors. This shows how hopeless it is 
to attempt to trace back speech to primitive 
ejaculatory sounds, for if this could be done 
it would be among such savages that the 
primitive sounds would be found. But the 
selection in right-handed persons of certain 
areas of the convolutions of the left brain to 
act as the instruments of the mental function of 
speech, strongly indicates that the rest of the 
convolutions are instrumental also, and that 
they are not endowed with any native ca- 
pacity for thought, any more than the unused 
convolutions of the speechless half of the 
brain are capable of spontaneously register- 
ing or uttering words. It is the conscious- 
ness therefore which makes the convolutions 



108 MA TEKIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOLOG Y 

receive impressions and formulate ideas, just 
as it is the consciousness which makes certain 
convolutions receive and enunciate words. 
If one part of the thinking brain is thus the 
instrument of consciousness, then all of it can 
be so. 

4. This conclusion is further borne out by 
the brain being a double or pair organ. It is 
plain that the possession of two brains no 
more gives a double capacity for thought than 
the possession of two eyes doubles the capac- 
ity for sight. But such would be the case 
inevitably if thought was produced by the 
brain cells, for then the more cells the more 
thought, and twice the number of cells would 
give twice the number of ideas, or increase 
correspondingly the amount of thinking. No 
physiologist, however, will entertain this idea 
for a moment. Instead of that it is plain that 
the consciousness can use one or the other of 
the hemispheres of the brain, or both together 
by means of the three commissures or bridges 
between them, as it uses one or both eyes by 
means of the optic commissure. Some physi- 
ologists, indeed, from the evident fact that one 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 109 

brain can do all that is needed for thinking, are 
unable to explain why an extra brain is provided. 
5. Prof. Tyndall, in a celebrated address, 
once intimated that human consciousness may 
pass into utter non-existence, by speaking of 
certain things as abiding when himself and 
his hearers had " lapsed into the infinite azure 
of the past." But we do not need to regard 
consciousness from any blue distance to find 
it cease altogether, for it does so normally 
every time we go to bed. What becomes, 
then, of this great reality, this third thing in 
the universe of Huxley? If consciousness 
cannot be conceived of apart from qualities, 
in sleep it has no qualities whatever ; that is, 
it does not give a trace of a manifestation of 
existence. If on that account it is for the time 
non-existent, then anything more phantasmal 
than this third thine in the universe cannot 
be imagined. A great reality which becomes 
complete unreality every sixteen hours ! 
When asleep therefore, all men are neither 
virtuous, nor vicious, nor intellectual, nor sim- 
ple, nor anything else, for they are all equally 
non-existent in every mental and moral respect. 



1 1 MA TEKIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIOL O G Y 

If the cessation of consciousness in sleep 
means abolition of consciousness, all these 
statements, and many more like them, must 
be true. The greatest genius the world has 
ever seen must have been not only an inter- 
mitting one, but a pure nothing for a third of 
his life. But instead of this recurrent vacuum 
theory of consciousness, we can equally re- 
gard sleep as a significant sign in the brain 
that its consciousness is virtually an outsider, 
for the brain never tires with any work of its 
own. It cannot do both its own work and 
also carry consciousness continuously. Every 
other work of the physical mechanism, in- 
cluding the nervous portion of it, can be 
carried on uninterruptedly except when con- 
sciousness takes part. Why that " except," 
unless the conscious work has in it an intrin- 
sically different, and therefore foreign element 
from any other natural operation of the 
body ? This is particularly shown when the 
consciousness is most imperious in its inter- 
ference, by directing the brain to think, and 
the muscle to contract, by will alone. It is 
then like a rider putting his horse to a run, 



OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 1 I 1 

and only a strong brain can keep up thinking 
by will alone even for one hour. 

The only answer of the materialist to the 
conclusion that the consciousness does not 
cease to exist, though it vanishes, in sleep, is — 
but where does it withdraw to ? It withdraws, 
we reply, to where it comes back from ; com- 
ine back the same as it went, and not a new 
existence every time the brain cell feels the 
stimulus of its presence. It can exist with- 
out the brain, just as in sleep the brain exists 
without it. He who denies this, denies it solely 
on account of the mental infirmity of incre- 
dulity, not on account of the mental virtue of 
skepticism. Incredulity is based wholly upon 
supposed personal experience, and will believe 
nothing else. Hence it cannot be reasoned 
with, as it is always scornful in its reliance on 
this often most fallacious testimony. A com- 
pany of Asiatics once tried to laugh me down 
for saying that the earth turned over, because 
they had never experienced its doing so 
and were sure the sea would be spilled in the 
process. This mental trait often equally illus- 
trates its nature as a mental weakness, by the 



112 MA TERIALISM AND MODERN PHYSIO LOG Y 

same persons who are incredulous about some 
things, exhibiting in other things the most 
facile credulity. Skepticism, on the other 
hand, in the original Greek good meaning of 
the word, is the healthy frame of mind which in 
all serious questions cares nothing for expe- 
rience, but everything for arguments. That 
we have no experience now where the con- 
sciousness withdraws to in sleep, true skep- 
ticism takes little account of, but rather 
thoughtfully holds the balancing scales, as this 
consideration and that are added to either 
side of the question. When, in addition to 
the other considerations which we have ad- 
duced, the inseparable relations in our life of 
consciousness and sleep are presented, we are 
quite willing to leave with such a candid judge 
the choice, as regards consciousness, between 
the only two alternatives possible, namely, 
separate existence or non-existence. Does 
not sleep testify to the continuance of mind, 
though as much disassociated from matter, 
as matter is then disassociated from it, rather 
than that such a transcendent reality as mind 
can be regularly both something and nothing? 



